The taxi cab crept through gridlock, snuck into a fortuitous opening in the left- hand lane and soon brought an end Monday to a Denver woman's seemingly impossible journey.

Sitting in the back seat, Elbra Wedgeworth, 52, helped steam up the car's window talking about the anticipation that had been building inside her heart for the past three years - and for a lifetime before that, too.

"I don't know how to feel about it," she said as the taxi crept through jam-packed streets. "I'm just really excited, but I'm trying to stay calm about it. . . . I'm going to have history on my hands."

This was it: the short ride from a DuPont Circle hotel to the Capitol Hill office where she'd get to pick up tickets to today's inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

A couple of hundred thousand "lucky few" got to pick up their tickets Monday. They jammed some corridors outside congressional offices and emerged excitedly once they finally got their prized packets.

Wedgeworth's smile had a bit more enamel than most. She earned it by providing the initial spark behind efforts to bring the Democratic National Convention to Denver, effectively building the mile-high platform that put a Democrat in the White House.

'I'm still amazed'

What she didn't know in 2005, when she famously pressed Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean to give Denver a shot, was that it would help a fellow black get to take the oath of office Tuesday for the highest office in the land.

"I'm still amazed," Wedgeworth said. "I won't believe it until his hand is in the air. I wonder what my great-great-grandparents would say right now."

Wedgeworth had a humble start to this long journey.

Her father was a landscaper. Her mother was a housewife. And she spent most of her childhood living in Curtis Park public housing projects before moving into the Cole neighborhood as a teenager.

She said her parents were Democrats, but they didn't push politics. Wedgeworth didn't get involved in politics until long after she graduated from Manual High School in 1974 and from the University of Redlands in California in 1978.

Eventually, she took a job on the staff of then-auditor Wellington Webb, the future mayor. In 1999, she ran for - and won - her own City Council seat.

She worked her way up to City Council president, and that's where she got to put her famous persistence to work on Denver's host city bid. The city had been thwarted twice before. But in 2005, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean came to Colorado for a visit, not long after his call for a "50-state strategy" helped him win the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

"I just raised my hand and asked, 'If we can host the pope, we can do this. What do you think?' " she said.

That led to some phone calls, then an organizational breakfast, then the fundraising pitches and the building of a bandwagon for others to jump upon.

"This momentum started building," she said. "It was kind of our time and our turn to do this."

There were dark days, including too many when she woke up to headlines that could doom the effort.

Amid the darkness, Wedgeworth said her goal was to keep pushing toward the light.

"It's the light that nobody sees but you," she said. "We just kind of said, 'Eyes on the prize. Eyes on the prize.' "

That was long before anyone knew who the star of Denver's convention might be.

"Three years ago when we started this, my main focus was helping the city of Denver and Colorado," she said. "I never imagined . . . I think a lot of people never imagined we would elect an African-American president."

Journey almost complete

As the taxi finally approached Capitol Hill, she clutched her friend, Dr. Morris Clark, 63, a surgeon from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Clark grew up in segregated West Virginia, and as he approached the Capitol some of the pain came back. "I remember my father being able to go to water fountains because he was light skinned, and me not being able to," he said.

Finally, the taxi reached the Hart Senate Office Building. Wedgeworth and Clark joined a long line of people and waited to go through security. When another out-of-towner figured out why Wedgeworth was there, he introduced himself and asked if he could take his picture with her.

Inside, they took the elevator to the seventh-floor office of Sen. Ken Salazar, who is in his last days on the job, pending his confirmation as Interior secretary. When Wedgeworth got to the front desk, she hugged the woman who was passing out the tickets.

She took snapshots of the official hand-over. She beamed excitedly when she got the "purple section" standing-area tickets in her hands. And when her old friend Salazar came through the door with his entire family in tow, she hugged everyone she could.

Tickets in her hands, the journey was almost complete.

"This," she said, "brings everything full circle."

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