PCMA Convene -- History in the Making
Date Posted: March 01, 2009
Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration was a moving experience for the millions of people who tuned in to witness this dramatic milestone in U.S. history. Behind the scenes, a drama of another kind was playing out — as event professionals worked around the clock against a crushing timeline and heightened security to mount a large-scale national celebration.
H Hargrove Inc. has worked on every presidential inaugural going back to Harry S. Truman's in 1949, and has served as general services contractor to the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) since Bill Clinton became president in 1993. Despite its long history, the Lanham, Md.-based event, trade show, and exhibit company didn't actually get the contract to start working on this year's inaugural events for Barack Obama - for which it again served as the PIC's general contractor - until after Christmas. H That gave Hargrove less than a month to design, build, set up, and produce 16 official events, including all 10 official inaugural balls, a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and a parade. H It sounds crazy. But that's just the way the process works, because the PIC comes together only after a president has been elected, and is made up of volunteers who might not have any experience managing a presidential event. "We go in with a proposal and bid it like we would do any job," said Diana Simmons, Hargrove's executive vice president. "Especially when [the administration] changes and the people change, we have to go in [as an unknown] to the Presidential Inaugural Committee."
Hargrove was also contracted by private organizations to handle another 28 unofficial, non-PIC inaugural events, including the Texas State Society's famous Black Tie & Boots Ball. All told, over six days in January, the company was responsible for 44 events in 34 venues - from Union Station, the National Building Museum, the D.C. Armory, and the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center across the Potomac River in National Harbor, Md. For the inauguration season, Hargrove bumped its 200-person staff up to 800 employees, many of them working in three shifts around the clock to fabricate stage sets, signs, and parade floats. "It happens," said Hargrove President Carla Hargrove-McGill. "It's a train, and it's going, and you kind of roll with the punches."
A few weeks after the inauguration, when the train had slowed to a manageable crawl, Convene talked to Simmons and Hargrove-McGill at Hargrove's headquarters, a sprawling facility that sits on 70 acres outside Washington, D.C., and includes a fabrication shop, a graphic design and detailing operation, and a warehouse with more than a dozen loading bays. We also spoke by phone with Fergus Rooney, co-founder and partner with Event Architects, a Chicago-based event-management company that the PIC contracted to produce a series of events, including a gospel brunch two days before the inauguration and three bipartisan dinners the night before the inauguration. Then we edited Simmons', Hargrove-McGill's, and Rooney's comments into a collective backstage tour of the planning and execution of a presidential inauguration.
Scope of Work
Simmons: [The stage set] is what the president was going to come and walk on - the president and the first lady. We pre-built it. We did a prototype here in the warehouse, and then brought the Presidential Inaugural Committee down to view it. Once they viewed it and were able to walk on it, we made modifications. Secret Service also had to come in and view it and make their modifications to it before we could go and build all the stage sets.
Hargrove-McGill: This time around, the campaign was so heavily red, white, and blue, we [went] back and forth, and what we came up with was more of a presidential look - a very elegant set without going over the top.
Rooney: [For the dinner events, the PIC] didn't want it to come off as ostentatious [or] lavish, to reflect the times we're in. They wanted it to look very sleek, very contemporary. We used wheat as a sign of prosperity in our centerpieces. That was kind of a cool tieback to the regular person. We used different china and glassware at the different events, but what was most important is that we didn't use
cut-glass crystal.
Simmons: What was new for Hargrove this time was that we won the contract to manage the technical - the audio and video, sound and lighting. That was a real benefit, because we were able to really facilitate how the planning and installation occurred. [We also provided] signage and graphics. That went beyond the balls, to parade routes. We did the [Walter E.] Washington Convention Center, because it had six balls there. We did all the outdoor towers and scaffolding with graphics. That was a whole logistical plan in itself - installing it all throughout the city, with the [traffic] barricades and stuff. That was within the week
[of the inauguration].
Organization and Logistics
Simmons: We had a war room. It was a physical room [at Hargrove's headquarters] where we moved desks and key functions all in one area, versus having people operate in the areas that they normally would operate out of. We functioned in that way, with oversight on the executive level. Carla was a main point of contact with the Presidential Inaugural Committee. As a matter of fact, Carla's office was at the Presidential Inaugural Committee [headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C.]. She was the main Hargrove person working with the committee, and my role was to manage the folks here and the overall budgeting of
the process itself.
Hargrove-McGill: Because the hotel-room situation was kind of limited, bringing in outside contractors was something that they didn't want to do. But also, it was really nice to use the local vendors here - who knew the buildings and the sites, and how to cut corners to save money when we needed to, [yet] make things look beautiful.
Rooney: Everybody is there for the same reason, giving their time. The real key is respecting [volunteers from the PIC and other organizations], and once you combine that respect with good communication, people are more than capable of getting in there and helping you out.
The Biggest Challenge
Simmons: It's the scope of it, the number of things that you have to do in a compressed timeframe - each with unique logistical challenges.
Hargrove-McGill: The Secret Service in itself puts a whole other layer of complications on logistics, on installations. We had four, five people just doing Secret Service clearance here for our people to get on site a week ahead of time.
Simmons: Even with just a regular corporate event, you have challenges with your changeover if you have an event the night before. You add to that the Secret Service, in terms of clearance, because we had to give clearance for every person [employed by Hargrove] two, three weeks in advance, which was very challenging. Then, when they come in and sweep, you've got to be completely out of there, so that reduces your timeframe. And then, once the sweep is conducted, you're in a lockdown. You can get in [to a venue after a lockdown], but you've got to go through security measures.
Hargrove-McGill: And just coordinating the logistics of making sure the right stuff's on the right trailer to go the right site. And there were street closures, so we had someone on top of mapping the whole city out, telling them how to get downtown, always looking at the TV stations that gave the closures and the timeframes, to make sure that the trucks got to where they needed to be at the right times.
Rooney: The biggest challenge was the timeline, plus the rawness of the people you're working with. The PIC people are recruited from the campaign, and they're skilled, but events is not their first skill set. And events from the campaign trail are not the same as [inaugural] events. But once you bit into the fact that the timeline was the timeline and there was nothing you could do about it, and once you started leading the people - everybody had the sense, let's just go ahead and make this work.
Surprises Along the Way
Hargrove-McGill: This happens every four years that a press stage will go up and it will have to be moved, because they'll look at it on the floor plan and it looks all dandy. But when you get it up, they want to move it. We know that's going to happen, and it did happen in a few instances, [but] it was caught early.
Simmons: We had various events in front of us at the D.C. Armory, but they ended up canceling, so we were able to adjust and go in a little earlier. That's a good adjustment. We had a situation at a venue where an event stayed in the room longer than you want it to. But those are typical things we know [will] happen.
Rooney: I really didn't believe that when I got to the PIC office for the first time that the PIC building opens only every four years for inaugurals. That's all it's used for. And then it closes down after the inauguration.
End Results
Hargrove-McGill: All the sites were maxed out, volume-wise, which might have not been the case four years ago. And everybody had a good time. You saw it. All the sites had [big-]name entertainment, and I just think that raises the level of excitement being there at a ball.
Simmons: It's one of those things like when you're a woman and you have a baby, and it's grueling going through labor, but afterwards ... you're very proud of it. If you ask a lot of the people here to tell you how long they've been here, they say, "Oh, this is my second inaugural." They measure their time at Hargrove by how many inaugurals that they've participated in.
Rooney: The sense of Washington, D.C., was very special. The world was watching the inauguration. There was much more emphasis on this than anything I've ever done, and I've done some big events. It was an honor to be part of it.
Hargrove-McGill: We do a lot of historical events here, being in the D.C. area. But this is a biggie. And being the first African-American president - it was huge. It was very emotional for a lot of people.
By the Numbers
Obama's 2009 Presidential Inaugural Committee raised more than $53 million, with at least 458 people giving the committee-imposed maximum amount of $50,000. On Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, there were:
- 20-plus jumbotrons
- 5,000 port-a-potties
- 10,000 National Guard troops
- 1.8 million people in attendance (estimate)
Six of a Kind
There were 10 official inaugural balls for Barack Obama. Six of them were held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in downtown Washington, D.C., at more or less the same time on the evening of Jan. 20: Obama Home States, Biden Home States, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Western, and - a first-time event - the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball.
That's a lot of balls to host under one roof at the same time. But during a tour of his facility two weeks later, Gregory O'Dell - CEO and general manager of the Washington Convention Center Authority (WCCA) - was unruffled. "Most of the process was the standard process that we'd do, but accelerated," O'Dell said. "The one thing that was new was the number of players involved, and the security concerns."
Those players included the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC), the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, the U.S. Secret Service, teams of vendors, staff, and volunteers, and a variety of District of Columbia officials, including health inspectors, fire marshals, and permitting officers. The morning of the inauguration, a two-block radius around the convention center was cordoned off, and WCCA staff had to control access to both the building and individual events inside.
About 45,000 people attended the six balls, where F&B was handled by the convention center's caterer, Centerplate, which served a total of 8,750 pounds of tortellini, 8,250 pounds of chicken roulade, 6,000 pounds of penne pasta, 850 gallons of tomato cream sauce, and 10,000 bottles of wine.
The most "elaborate and intimate" of the balls, O'Dell said, was the Neighborhood Ball - which was the first one that Barack and Michelle Obama visited on inauguration night, and the site of their memorable first dance to "At Last," sung live by Beyoncé. Not that O'Dell or his staff had time to get starstruck. The final ball ended at 1:30 a.m., and breakdown started immediately. The balls had to be out within 48 hours, so the convention center could begin setting up for ASAE & The Center's 2009 Association Technology Conference & Expo and the 2009 Washington Auto Show.
"For us, it's a sense of pride," O'Dell said. "We were very happy that we got a chance to showcase what we do on a weekly basis. It's great for the industry - not just those of us in this building."
Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.