Opinion: Tell your grandchildren: ‘I was there’

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WASHINGTON -- There were kids everywhere, groups of them streaming in from all over the country, if not with their parents, then with their teachers.

One group from Sacred Heart Cathedral, the oldest Catholic high school in San Francisco, emerged from the subway looking as if they had just run a fraternity gantlet. Their plan to change trains at L’Enfant Station went awry when they encountered a clot of humanity that one student described as ‘about a million people chanting ‘Give Me an O!’’

For safety’s sake, their cautious teachers turned back and came in another way.

No one questioned whether the journey was worth it.

‘Someday my grandchildren will ask me, ‘Where were you?’ and I can say, ‘I was there,’’ Christina Schreiner, 17, said as her friends put on freshly purchased T-shirts with the big man’s face on the front.

Their history teachers, escorting them on the journey of a lifetime, listened to her, beaming, as if they couldn’t believe their ears.

Another group of students, these from Manchester Community College in Manchester, Conn., came on three buses provided to those lucky enough to have won the lottery for a spot.

They had spent the night at the Jewish Community Center in Dupont Circle — ‘girls in the gym, boys on the squash courts.’

What time did they wake up to get to the teeming National Mall?

‘That would assume they actually went to bed,’ Jason Scappaticci, 27, a student advisor, noted.

-- Faye Fiore