Billy Pitt, a lifelong Democrat from Tennessee, will turn 77 on Sunday.
All he wants for his birthday is a ticket to history: the chance to hear Barack Obama speak at Invesco Field.
It started three months ago when his daughter, Mindy Molina of Denver, offered to pay $250 for a ticket to the Democratic National Convention.
“This is for my 78-year-old lifelong Democrat father who has already booked his ticket to fly out here in hopes of getting in!” she posted on Craigslist, missing his exact age by a couple of years.
This snared a single response, and someone just like her: a daughter trying to get her 78-year-old lifelong Democrat parent a DNC ticket.
“She wanted it for her mother, who campaigned for Kennedy, and was wondering if I’d had any luck,” Molina said.
But Billy Pitt is not just sitting around waiting.
“I called all the people I knew in Middle Tennessee politics,” he said. “No one had tickets. They were sort of left out.”
A former wholesale beauty-supply owner, Pitt has lived for 55 years in the same house in the town of Hendersonville, Tenn., where he once served two terms as a city commissioner.
He relentlessly campaigned for Al Gore and planned to attend his inauguration, but because that didn’t happen, he said, this is the next best thing.
So far, he’s made about 15 calls, including to the office of his congressional representative, Bart Gordon.
And then, one day, someone actually called him — a woman from Democratic Party headquarters who said she wanted to interview him about a possible seat at the convention.
She asked his age, a few other questions, and said she’d get back to him.
He’s still waiting, and wonders how they heard about him.
“It could be Bart Gordon’s office,” he said. “I have worked for him, so I put a little pressure there. I told him, ‘Why be in Congress and have all these years there if you don’t have any influence? You might as well just come on home.’ ”
Pitt’s passion for politics was in no way shared by his daughter when she was a child.
But by the time she was in college, he’d convinced her to campaign with him for Gore. Now father and daughter are teamed up again, with the hope of happy endings.
She’s as relentless as her father. On his birthday, she wanted to take him to dinner at the Capital Grille.
“I kept calling and they said, ‘No, we’re blocked off for DNC week.’ ”
But somehow she wrangled a reservation for the night of his birthday.
That’s his second gift from her.
The first was the plane ticket.
She’s still working on the third.
When she heard about the community credentials for the Obama speech, she signed up, along with her husband and her good friend Lori Becker.
Becker, who checked the willing-to-volunteer box, is the only one who got called. She asked for two seats — one for her, one for Billy.
She made about 160 calls for the campaign but missed a deadline to turn in her work, so she didn’t get one of the “all star” credentials to Invesco Field. Becker is now pleading her case with the campaign.
Back in Tennessee, Pitt is biding his time.
“I talked to a friend of mine who was a really good buddy of Al Gore’s, and he said he was going to try to get me some way to get in the convention during the week,” said Pitt.
“He’s still working on it.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
