WATSEKA, ILL. — A Watseka couple is headed to Washington, DC, today by car, ready for a big week of inaugural festivities.
Mitchell and Susan Wynn Bence were invited to attend the events this week for President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration.
The week will be packed with events.
They’ve picked out their finery and are ready to meet the week and all it has to offer.
Wednesday evening will be the Illinois Welcome Party, hosted by the Illinois Congressional Delegation and the Illinois State Republican Women’s Committee and others.
This will be a fun time and will be an event filled with people from Illinois.
Thursday will be a busy day, Susan said, as they first meet with Congressman Adam Kinzinger to pick up their credentials for the inaugural events.
That afternoon they will attend a National Federal of Republican Women pre-inaugural open house. This will be at the NFRW headquarters in Alexandria, Va.
Thursday night will be the Illinois Heartland Ball, something Susan and Mitchell said they are really looking forward to.
“This is probably the most elegant and well-attended of the balls,” Susan said of the non-partisan event. The event is black-tie. It includes live music, open bars and samplings of cuisine of the Heartland, according to the website.
“It was started when (President Abraham) Lincoln was inaugurated,” Mitchell said.
This event will have a lot of the Illinois Congressmen in attendance, Susan said.
Friday is inauguration day.
“We’ll get up early,” Susan said, indicating they want to be sure to get where they need to be for the inauguration. January in Washington DC can be cold so they’ve made sure to get nice outerwear, but the forecast is now for rain. Susan said they will be purchasing clear ponchos. Her reasoning is specific.
When she first was invited and started talking about what to wear, everyone told her she should wear a mink coat to the inauguration. She has one, but it is knee-length. “It won’t cover my legs,” she said. Soon, she said, one of her friends in Springfield was sending her a floor-length mink to borrow for the inauguration. The clear poncho will show to her friend that Susan did take her up on her generosity.
In fact, Susan said, people have been so nice about making sure she gets everything she needs for the event. “I feel like I’m taking a piece of friends and family with me,” she said.
Soon after the inauguration will be the parade, which she’s hoping to get to. She said people have told them it’s difficult to attend both the inauguration and the parade because of logistics, but they are going to try.
Susan is really wanting to attend the parade to see the Olivet Nazarene University Marching Tigers perform in it. She’s even prepared an ONU banner she hopes to fly as the band goes by, which she got from the ONU Alumni Office.
They believe the banner will be allowed to the event, but so many things are not that there’s a possibility the banner will not be as well. So far, it’s not been on any of the lists, though signs that do not meet size restrictions will not be allowed. Some of the disallowed items include umbrellas, firearms, aerosols, backpacks, laser pointers and selfie sticks.
After the parade the Bences will go back to their hotel and ready for the Presidential Ball, which is later that night. This, she said, will be another big event.
The final event for the Bences is Saturday for a special brunch of the National Federation of Republic Women Regents, of which Susan is one. That will be at the Capitol Hill Club. “We’re going to stay for that and then start home,” she said.
Each of the Bences have been to Washington DC before, though not with each other and not for a few years.
In fact, this is Susan’s second invitation to an inauguration, though it is the first one she’ll be attending.
“When I was in college, the first campaign I worked for was for Ronald Reagan,” she said. After he won, she was invited to the 1981 inauguration, but she was also starting her student teaching. If she was gone a week from student teaching to attend the inauguration, she said, she was told she’d have to start her student teaching requirement over the next semester. She was ready to get her degree and get into the classroom, so she opted to stay back and do the student teaching requirement rather than attend the inauguration. In hindsight, she says, she would have gone to the inauguration.
They both are looking forward to the trip, though there are some concerns.
“Safety,” Mitchell said. “There’s some concern about protestors.”
They attended the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last year, where there also were protestors. Susan said the police officers were so kind and helpful and blocked off the protestors from the attendees. “We’re hoping that it will kind of be like that,” she said.
“It’s exciting and a little scary at the same time,” she said, noting that there are some who have not come to terms with Trump being president. She said she has heard about students who have not been able to deal with the election results and having to have “safe rooms” to deal with their emotions. She said she remembers when the space shuttle blew up on live television. She was teaching that day and she and her students were watching that tragedy unfold. “It was just you and your class,” she said. “We didn’t have safe rooms. I think the young people of today need to grow up.” She said, too, that Trump will be the Commander-in-Chief and people will need to respect that. “If we don’t, we are going to come tumbling down like Rome,” she said. “We’ve got to come together. We are all Americans.”
She said when she was younger she played sports and she sometimes would complain about a coach. Her dad, she said, would tell her that the coach is the coach and ‘you follow his lead’.
“We’ve lost that somewhere,” she said.
Susan also believes that if people are unhappy about a situation they should “do something about it. You can be part of the problem or be part of the solution. My mom and dad told me to work hard and be part of the solution.”
As the Bences travel today and get ready for the week of celebrating, they are happy that they are doing it together. “We love traveling together,” Mitchell said.
And they look forward to what the week will bring.
“It’s not Ronald Reagan,” Susan said, “But I’ll take it.”
