Crystal, Third Floor Dweller and I went down to a Union Station on a dreary Sunday morning yesterday to show our support for Barack Obama during the Good Morning America Whistlestop 08 sendoff.
We arrived just before 9:00 and had to spend just over an hour jostling for position on the velvet rope with the McCain and Palin crew. Looking and speaking with the crowd it is obvious that I would most likely want to go out for drinks and conversation with the Obama Biden crowd. I think I would most likely want to use the McCain Palin crowd as designated drivers. I was not sure if they were using sticks to hold their signs, or if those sticks were stuck firmly up their asses. These people are against gay marriage, so maybe they would not sit on pieces of lumber, but judging by their stiff demeanor and the fact that some of them were wearing their Sunday best on a rainy Sunday really says something to me. And the two "discussions" I got into with McCain backers were less than stellar, one guy wanted to tell me that Obama classifies me as "rich" if I have a 401K, and another lady told me "all change isn't good change". And then minutes later must have thought that talking out of turn goes against her moral beliefs so she came over to apologize to me. I laughed and let her know that disagreement was OK in America and she didn't have to apologize.
Overall the corwd as pretty good size, I would guesstimate about 600 people with about a 60/40 Obama McCain split. I brought down one of my big Shepard Fairey Obama Progress pasters, as well as a smaller DIY sign with 6 of the Progress .pdf's on it. I also had a folder with about 30 loose small Progress .pdf's which Crystal passed out to some willing folks. I was happy to have the only Fairey prints in the house and received a fair amount of notice with them.
Shortly after 10am Diane Sawyer, Robin Roberts and Chris Cuomo made their way thru the grand hall, shaking hands with folks and posing for an occasional picture while being shot by the GMA cameras for this morning's show. Then up the big staircase they went, thru the crowd on the platform and onto the Whistle-stop train.
They certainly didn't wait long to get out of Worcester because by the time we were back in the car and on Southbridge St. the train was passing us by on the CSX line.
But as a lifelong Today show guy, the GMA Whistlestop 08 tour did part of its job, because this morning I Tivo'd GMA (I couldn't be seen on TV) but watched most of the train coverage as they traveled to Palmer, Springfield and beyond, and I will probably Tivo the rest of the tour.
In this video below from the Telegram website you can see my Progress poster from 26 thru 30 seconds in.
entertaining ourselves by getting excited by seeing the likes of The Worcester Shark's Finz, The Worcester
1 comment:
Most people at the event were politics, or obama, and macain fans. However there were others there as well. My name is John Rezuke. I've been railfanning the worcester area for awile now. The day before the event i was filming the 9am T when i found out that amtrak superliner equipment would be rolling into Union around 9am the next day. I was able to film the T train, and the gma train. I had never seen superliner equipment in my life, and seeing them in worcester for the first and last time, was a must. I even got to shake hands with Diane and ask questions to the rest of the cast. Superliners are very rare to see in ma since amtraks lake shore is a single level train. The f40ph was great as well. Its been years since i've seen them on amtrak trains in worcester. September 15, 2008 in worcester ma will be a day to remember for railfans, and in boston and albany RR history.
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