MiddletownJournal.com

Washington — Hours after they'd watched Barack Obama sworn in as president of the United States here, about 30 former Obama volunteers huddled around a table in a cozy Russian restaurant in the nation's capital and recalled times in Dayton.

They had all lived in Dayton just a few months earlier, moving in from places like New York City and Washington, D.C., to help the Obama campaign. Many had never visited Ohio, much less Dayton, at all.

"I bought a book (on it)," said Andres Correa, 26, a native of Chile who has called Texas his home for the past 15 years, to laughter at the table.

Further down the table, another former volunteer laughed about how he'd Googled Dayton to find out about the Midwestern city.

Now, they were celebrating the fruit of their labors – the inauguration of the man they'd worked so hard to get elected. This was their first reunion.

Gary Therkildsen, 29, of Washington, D.C., had worked as a police officer at the U.S. Capitol before coming to Dayton. He found himself organizing the campaign in Kettering and Moraine during the very days when DHL was becoming a campaign football tossed between Obama and challenger U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Not everyone at the restaurant was an out-of-stater.

Kriss and Debbie Gang of Centerville were there with their son, Eric, and their buddy Dave Gorley, a Bethel Twp. native.

Up until last year, Gorley had been a Republican. But the war in Iraq and the crumbling economy changed that. He lost his job. His nephew was sent to Iraq, where Iraqis spit on him. He became, by his description, "a 40-year-old temp with no health insurance.

"I lost everything in the Bush administration," Gorley said.

So he became an Obama supporter. He knocked on 10,000 doors for Obama. He made 5,000 phone calls.

During one door-knocking campaign, a little old lady asked him in. She needed a lightbulb changed and she needed her toilet fixed. Gorley, 40, gamely obliged.

Dimitri Portnoy, 29, of New York City, had spent most of his life in the Big Apple, a city that could always bank on tourism to prop up the economy. He signed up to help Obama in Ohio and wound up a field organizer in East Dayton.

One day, he went to Xenia Avenue to canvass. Armed with a clipboard filled with registered voters, he stepped onto one block and saw one boarded up house after another.

The second block was filled with gutted buildings.

Portnoy looked at his clipboard. Just a year or two ago, people lived in those houses, people invested enough in their neighborhood to register to vote. People with families. People with jobs.

It shook him.

"That street was just gone," he said.

What did his time in Dayton teach him?

Easy.

"You can't leave any part of the country behind," he said.