The need to share a monumental moment with other people, even strangers, made more than 100 people rise early, dress up and gather at the Plaza Club in Downtown Honolulu to view Barack Obama's presidential inauguration yesterday morning.

Ala Moana resident Yolanda Miller, 54, showed up at 6 a.m. so she could get a seat at the Plaza Club bar in front of the TV.

"I've been watching at home since 2 o'clock," said Miller, a speech and language pathologist.

She went to the Plaza Club event, co-sponsored by the African-American Association of Hawaii, with a friend from Trinity Missionary Baptist Church.

"You have the first black president of the United States of America," Miller said. "I wanted to be with people celebrating and treasuring this moment together, this special moment in history."

The party was a smashing success. Organizers originally expected to host 60 people, but more than 100 people paid $20 each for the affair, said Dennis Johnson, club manager.

"We wanted to be among like-minded people to see this historic event and to partake in history," said Kaimuki resident Tonya Huntley, 30. "And we don't have a TV."

She and husband Rich Tanaka recently gave their TV away to charity, said Huntley, owner of Malu Pet Bliss, a pet-sitting company.

Huntley, a member of the NAACP, thinks Obama's speech will go down as one of the most significant in inaugural speech history.

"He held everyone American accountable for the direction (the United States) needs to go in and I just like the fact that he called for all of us to take back this country," Huntley said. "It's definitely a call to duty."

Tanaka, 34, an environmental engineer, said the new president brings a refreshing message about how people, even in the highest circles, should treat one another. "We have to be citizens of the world and therefore have to be more responsible to each other, and that's a great message."

'Ewa Beach resident Deloris Hairston also embraced Obama's call to responsibility to rebuild America.

"We, as a people, need to work together," Tanaka said. "It's a 'we' thing, not an 'I' thing," said Hairston, 59, who took a day off from teaching at Wai'anae High School to watch the inauguration.

"All these years, I've told the students to dream and dream," she said. "Now, there's no glass ceiling. You can become president no matter what race you are, or who you are."

For Bruce Coppa, chief operating officer for Communications Pacific, the day was "chicken skin." "It's a new day, it's exciting," said Coppa, 55, of Nu'uanu.

Gerald Sumida and wife Heidi Wild agreed. They were in Shanghai, China, the day Obama was elected and saw people there equally excited by the occasion.

Sumida, a 64-year-old Makiki attorney, said he appreciates that "Obama is from Hawai'i and appears already to approach things in a way a lot of us recognize."

Those Hawai'i-like qualities include "inclusiveness and a willingness to listen to others," he said.

Just as Sumida said that, he and his wife cleared their small table to make way for strangers to sit with them.

"He instills hope in people," said Wild, 60, an independent consultant. "I've been amazed by the joy he puts on people's faces. He gives everybody hope for the future."

Tripler resident Sheri Porras, 30, said Obama's election represents "a culmination of a lot of people's hopes and dreams."

Porras, a writer who is African-American, said that idea permeates "not only in government but of America itself."

Salt Lake hairstylist Micki Fine, 56, could not stop clasping her hands, nodding her head and tearing up occasionally as Obama, and then others, spoke from Washington.

"He's not only inspired, he's rekindled that spirit in me to do more," Fine said. A board member for the Affordable Housing Alliance, Fine said she now wants to do more.

A Hawai'i resident since she was 21, Fine believes racism was not a major issue when she first moved here.

"We've become too much like the Mainland," she said, adding that the tension she feels today is not so much racial in nature as it is economic, "divided by class."

Fine said she hopes that will change, nationwide, with Obama's presidency.

Reginald White and his wife, Margaret White, have been visiting their daughter and her family in Hawai'i. Back home in the Duchess County section of Poughkpeepsie, N.Y., the two helped Obama's campaign.

"I never thought I'd see this in my lifetime," said Reginald White, 67, a retired environmental engineer.

Margaret White, 68, a retired social worker and college professor, said she and her grandchildren took part in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Waikiki the previous day. The grandchildren, she said, rode on the "float of diversity."

Reginald White said that while he and his wife are proud that a fellow African-American is now president, people need to remember that Obama grew up with his white grandparents in Hawai'i and white mother in Indonesia, and had an Asian stepfather.

"He comes from all those perspectives," Margaret White said.

"He's a man of the world," Reginald White said.