On election night, photographer Matt Mendelsohn sat in front of his TV and said to his wife, "I can't believe I'm not making a picture of this day."

It's been seven years since Mendelsohn worked for a newspaper — his last gig was at USA Today — but his passion for documenting important moments in history did not expire with his press pass.

His frustration mounted as he sat in his living room in Arlington, Va., and watched as thousands of Americans poured into Chicago's Grant Park. There was Oprah, waiting, and Jesse Jackson, crying, and image after image of regular citizens who were determined to stake their own claims in this monumental moment in history.

The journalist in Mendelsohn was antsy, but it was the father in him that finally pushed him out the door.

"I used to cover things and think that someday I'd tell my daughter, 'Daddy covered that,'" he said. "But this time, I wanted to be able to tell her, 'Daddy was there.'"

About 11 p.m., Mendelsohn turned to his wife and said, "I've got to go out and shoot."

Mendelsohn knew better than to head for the White House.

"I knew I'd never find a parking space," he said, laughing.

He drove through the quiet streets, and then it hit him: Lincoln.

There will be a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, he told himself. He raced to the memorial, parked far away and then lugged his cameras through the mist of rain. He approached a bored TV crew, who tried to warn him off.

"Nothing to see," one of them said.

Mendelsohn looked up toward the memorial and saw a small group of people gathered on the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. had given his "I Have a Dream" speech more than 40 years ago. Something was going on.

He walked up the steps and found 26 people huddled around a transistor radio.

"They stood there in the drizzling rain and just listened to Barack Obama's speech. Some of them were sniffling because they were crying, but that was the only sound they made. You could hear the crowd a few blocks away outside the White House, but this group was absolutely silent."

Mendelsohn's photo of that moment appeared on The New York Times' op-ed page the next day, along with 200 words describing the scene. The photo was far too small on the page, but readers found it anyway. He has been deluged with e-mails from grateful Americans.

"I think they saw something in that little group of people," he said. "I think they saw themselves."

Here in Cleveland, one of my colleagues, Plain Dealer cartoonist Jeff Darcy, knows exactly what Mendelsohn means.

Like Mendelsohn, Darcy is 45, so he's just old enough to remember the images of a different America. When it was clear that Obama would win, Darcy also turned toward the Lincoln Memorial to tell the story of this election.

In his cartoon that ran last Wednesday, a tearful Abraham Lincoln extends his giant hand for a fist bump with President-elect Barack Obama.

Readers are still writing and calling.

"You expect a little response because people are emotionally primed," Darcy told me. "But I didn't expect this volume."

He described an elderly white man who was only able to leave part of his message. "I'm still reeling from everything that happened," the man said, "and then I saw your cartoon."

"That's all he got out," Darcy said. "He started to cry and hung up the phone."

When I asked Darcy why he thought so many readers responded with such emotion, he sounded a lot like Mendelsohn.

"I think they saw themselves in Lincoln," he said. "I think they saw who they wanted to be."

To see Mendelsohn's photograph: www.mattmendelsohn.net.

To see Darcy's cartoon: www.cleveland.com/darcy/index.ssf?/darcy/more/110508.html.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.