After leaving the Hyatt Hotel in Sacramento on Wednesday to come home something astonishing occurred to me -- Tuesday night marked the 30th Anniversary of the first Election Night parties I ever attended! (It's probably just as well I didn't think of that milestone Tuesday night.)

Let's travel back to 1976....

I was a 9th grader at Paul Revere Junior High School in Brentwood. Along with a couple of friends, I started volunteering at the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club in September or October.

In 1976 I was a Democrat for two reasons: 1) the Democratic Club HQ was near where I got off the school bus while the Republican Club was way far away and 2) Chuck Reichman, my new friend at Paul Revere (I went to a experimental traveling school for the 7th and 8th grades -- but that's a whole different blog entry) was volunteering at the Democratic Club and anything Chuck did, I thought was cool.

I remember after school on Election Day riding my bike to check voter turnout at three or four polling places, then rushing back to the HQ so we could phone Democrats who hadn't voted yet to turn them out.

After the polls closed one of the Club members was nice enough to take me along to some election night parties in West Los Angeles. I remember that night the Democrats won the White House (Jimmy Carter), but things didn't turn out so well locally -- U.S. Senator John Tunney (a Democrat) lost his re-election bid and Bob Dornan (a Republican) was first elected to Congress (I think '76 was the year he beat Gregory Peck's son, Carey.)

Anyway, I loved, loved, loved Election Night. Thinking back on it, I pretty much did the same thing in 1976 that I did on Tuesday -- stood by the front door of the party and told my friends the names of the VIPs (big and little) making their appearance.