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175 NY winners in Obama inauguration lottery named

BY REID J. EPSTEIN | reid.epstein@newsday.com; Sta

December 18, 2008

Lauren Melicharek had an audacious request for a Christmas present from her father: an impossible-to-buy ticket to Barack Obama's inauguration.

Instead of waiting to look under the family tree, Melicharek, 23, of North Babylon, was named yesterday as one of 175 people to win a pair of inauguration tickets in Sen. Charles Schumer's statewide lottery. Naturally, she's taking her dad with her.

"It's the first time I've ever won anything in my whole life," Melicharek said yesterday at Schumer's Manhattan office.

Schumer said his office received 150,000 requests for tickets to Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration. The winners, he said, included a woman from Rochester who marched in the Civil Rights Movement and a Brooklyn toddler whose father entered her in the contest.

The winners include 13 people each from Nassau and Suffolk and 85 from New York City.

"It's just a great cross-section of New York," Schumer said. "This is a holiday present for 350 lucky New Yorkers."

Washington, D.C., police are expecting up to 4 million people to converge on the city for the inauguration, but only about 250,000 people will have tickets to the reviewing stand in front of the Capitol.

Winner Kelly Haller, 26, of Huntington said she and her husband plan to stay with family in Williamsburg, Va., about three hours from the capital. "I think it's going to be crazy," she said.

And Janice Discala of Freeport said she's taking her childhood friend, Carol Horstmann of Lake Ronkonkoma.

"Of course I thought I'd win," joked Discala, 63. "Are we going to get invited to any of the parties?"

The answer to that, Schumer said, is no. Ticket winners are also on their own for transportation and rooms, which will be exceedingly difficult to find, with hotels around Washington either booked or asking several times the typical room rate.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola) will hold a ticket lottery for her constituents soon, her office said.

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) said most of his 198 inauguration tickets were given to politicians, clergy, police and fire workers, and people who wrote "beautiful notes about how much they wanted to go."

While sleeping arrangements are an issue for some, it's not for Rebecca Prowler, 19, an American University sophomore from Port Washington. She has an air mattress in her dorm room reserved for her mother.

And Shirley Jean, 28, of Flushing is sure to become popular with her friends. She was the rare winner whose second ticket isn't yet spoken for.

Staff writer Juliann Vachon in Washington contributed to this story.