Former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., left, chats with President Ford at the White House. Cianci addressed conventions in 1976 and 1980.

AP

In a ballroom in New York’s Waldorf Astoria, the Secret Service agent told me to wait on the other side of a door leading to a kitchen pantry.

That’s where Sen. Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s pick to be vice president on the 1992 Democratic ticket, would give me an interview.

The incident remains one of the most vivid from the 13 conventions I have covered — 5 Democrat, 8 Republican — beginning in 1972.

Conventions are grand spectacles of politics, pageantry and speeches. Sometimes you truly see history in the making, such as the precedent-shattering vice-presidential nomination of Joe Lieberman, a Jew, at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. Still, when I look back, I think less about the floor sessions and more about the off-stage moments.

I’m not going to Denver for this year’s Democratic gathering, or to St. Paul for the GOP, but I can survive for years with memories of the conventions I did get to.

The 1992 Waldorf conversation traced its origins to an interview I did in Rhode Island when Gore first ran for president in 1988. I wrote that he had vice president written all over him.

He was only 39, had a southern moderate appeal, and his father once sought the VP nod in a celebrated joust with John F. Kennedy in 1956. Even so, young Gore insisted to me he had no interest in the second slot.

Mike Dukakis won the 1988 presidential nomination and didn’t offer Gore the veepship. But now it’s 1992 and Clinton taps him.

So: OK, it took four years, but I’d been right all along. When I whipped out a copy of my old column and showed it to Carol Young, a top Journal editor, as I was about to head for New York, she asked if I was going to show it to Gore.

Sure. But, um, how exactly would I pull this off? I went to the Waldorf, where Gore, now a major star, would be addressing a Democratic governors’ policy forum. I enlisted Gov. Bruce Sundlun, who introduced me to a Democratic Governors Association aide, who spoke to Gore’s communications director, who spoke to the Secret Service, which stashed me on the other side of that door, where they’d be bringing Gore through after his speech.

In the pantry there were salt and pepper shakers and an icemaker and it was spooky: I kept thinking of Bobby Kennedy’s fate in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen.

Gore finally swept in. I handed him the column about being vice president, asked him how come I could see it coming and he couldn’t, and he laughed and we had a nice chat for a few minutes as he walked through the kitchen and down a hall.

Gore was, of course, a political celeb, although not everyone treated him that way, including an aide I encountered at the 1996 Chicago convention. I was shadowing then-Rep. Jack Reed, and we encountered the vice president in the bowels of the United Center. I approached and Gore was quick to accommodate me with some quotes I’d need for my piece on Reed’s Senate candidacy. But the conversation soon would end. The aide told Gore, “You don’t have time for this stuff.”

Politicians are far from the only stars you see at conventions. In Miami Beach at the 1972 GOP convention that renominated Richard Nixon — “Four more years! Four more years!” — I went to a news conference that featured John Wayne, Ethel Merman and Jimmy Stewart.

I also attended a very different kind of news conference, the headliner here being the late Dr. George Wiley, the National Welfare Rights Organization executive director.

The purpose: to criticize the convention as “very closed” to poor people. Wiley, who grew up in Providence, staged the event in the marble-laden lobby of the luxurious Fontainebleau Hotel.

Wiley’s name later came to grace an organization that stands up for Rhode Island’s poor.

At the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, incumbent President Gerald Ford barely staved off a challenge from Ronald Reagan. It was the last meaningful floor contest for either party. You might recall that Mayor Buddy Cianci got a taste of the spotlight with a speech introducing former Treasury Secretary John Connally. What I remember better is that, for days, the band one minute would play the University of Michigan song, “The Victors,” for Ford, then “California, Here I Come” for Reagan.

THERE ARE all kinds of ways to measure time. In my early convention days, reporters wrote stories on manual typewriters and dispatched them via Western Union. But here’s another standard: In 1976, the liberal state Sen. Lila Sapinsley and another Rhode Island delegate abstained from voting for Bob Dole for vice president because they could not determine how he stood on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

At the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit, the big news from Rhode Island was an eight-minute address by Cianci, now the nominee for governor. He was beside himself with excitement, not just from the podium time but also from the VIPs he encountered. Do you recall he rehearsed the speech in a holding room in front of Wayne Newton? I thought the quintessential Cianci revealed himself earlier in the evening, when he came across NBC’s David Brinkley. Cianci approached and said, “I’d be remiss if I didn’t say hello. Buddy Cianci, mayor of Providence.”

A surprised Brinkley replied, “Oh, how do you do?,” and walked on.

The ’80 convention produced one terrific news evening — which is one more than most. Presidential nominee Reagan toyed with naming Ford — who’d been VP before he was president — as his running mate. Indeed, it sounded like a done deal. But late that night, as I stood in line at a concession stand, I noticed a news person holding up a message to grab the attention of a co-worker: “NBC says it’s Bush!”

I headed back to the press benches and came upon legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who was struggling whether to go with the story. Oh yes, I assured him, NBC says it’s true. But Bradlee didn’t care about NBC, he was worried how The Post would look if the report was wrong.

Soon, Reagan made a dramatic appearance at the convention hall and announced he had indeed picked George H.W. Bush.

CONVENTIONS CAN range from light-hearted to somber.

At the 1984 GOP edition in Dallas, a baby elephant showed up one day at the Rhode Islanders’ hotel and I interviewed the owner. But a more valuable exercise was accompanying Rhode Island delegate Lester Hilton as he visited the Texas School Book Depository and peered out the open sixth-floor window through which Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed JFK on Nov. 22, 1963. I looked down too, considered the logistics, and thought: It’s all more understandable now how he could pull this off; it wasn’t that difficult a shot.

At the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, which nominated Dukakis, I asked Rhode Island delegate Walter R. Stone, a Jesse Jackson supporter, to accompany me to the King Center, where Martin Luther King, victim of a 1968 assassination, was entombed. Dukakis would be speaking outside the center. Jackson, whom Dukakis defeated, had been a King aide.

Stone told me about the tensions and beatings he had experienced in the early 1960s as a Nashville college student demonstrating for the desegregation of cafeterias and movie houses. The police would place a phone book on his head — no traces that way — and whack away with a billy club. “Your ears were ringing, and your vision was blurred.”

At that ’88 convention, Mayor Joe Paolino took me to a reception for fat cats. When Dukakis, who was governor of Massachusetts, saw me, he deadpanned, “Are you a contributor or what?” And he said, “I want you to know I was wearing my Rhode Island Democrats T-shirt when I was exercising this morning. Put that in the paper!”

When you’re thrown together with a pol at a convention, you can learn a lot. At the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, where Bush was renominated for president, I chronicled the dual worlds of Sen. John Chafee. He hobnobbed easily with other members of Congress and was a big hit with the Bush family; their ties went back to the Yale days. There was First Lady Barbara Bush giving him a hug…

And yet the liberal Chafee was out of step with the tough rhetoric of conservatives like Pat Buchanan who set the convention’s tone. Chafee was a staunch supporter of gun control. I introduced him to two gun advocates from Colorado, one of whom made a distinct impression on him. The senator told me later, “I get amused when I see that stern-faced young man from Colorado extolling the merits of assault weapons. All I can think of is, ‘Boy, it takes all kinds to make the world go round.’ ”

The ’92 Democratic convention in New York offered several chances to get to know Governor Sundlun better. One day, when I mentioned hailing a taxi, he told me that in the late 1940s, he was clerking for a New York law firm and getting $75 a month from the GI Bill of Rights. To make some extra dough, he drove a cab at night. Why didn’t his father, a Rhode Island lawyer, just give him some money? Sundlun said, “Did you ever meet my father?”

The 1996 Republican convention in San Diego nominated Bob Dole for president, but I prefer to remember it for my catching up with Gov. Lincoln Almond at the zoo. I’d heard he was out there and reached him by cell phone. He said, sure, meet him at the snack area near the monkeys.

When I arrived, he reported having seen a koala bear, gazelles, baby giraffes — and elephants. “I didn’t see any donkeys, although we heard a weird sound when we first got in here,” he chuckled. “They must have, you know, seen me coming, but they all hid somewhere.”

At the 1996 Democratic conclave in Chicago, I spent time with Secretary of State Jim Langevin, now a congressman. Driver/aide Jay Ferreira drove us toward the convention hall. Langevin sat in his wheelchair in the back of the rented van, which had a handicapped windshield tag.

When we encountered a police detour, Ferreira politely said, “Excuse me, sir, I have — ”

The officer interrupted and insisted we’d have to go left instead of straight. “I don’t care if you have Jesus Christ in the van,” he declared, “you’re going this way.”

It took forever to find a place to park and for Langevin to maneuver to the arena, through security, and thread his way through the traffic on the convention floor. But he was the picture of calm. At one point, amid a crush of delegates in the Rhode Island section, I asked if he did not feel trapped. Langevin said, “No. I know if I needed to get out I’d make my way out just as I made my way in. You have to see the possibilities.”

Over the years, I have had many conversations with Langevin about stem-cell research, which he supports. Our dialogue began with that convention, where actor Christopher Reeve — paralyzed, like Langevin, by spinal-cord injuries — was a featured speaker.

I’M REGULARLY on the lookout for humor. And while I always enjoyed what I considered to be Al Gore’s dry wit, many people thought him boring, maybe a little whiny — he’d badmouth things as “risky” — and there was a flap over how much credit he deserved in development of the Web.

Now, at the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, nominee George W. Bush skewered him.

Bush said, “If my opponent had been there at the moon launch, it would have been called a ‘risky rocket scheme.’

“If he’d been there when Edison was testing the light bulb, it would have been a ‘risky anti-candle scheme.’

“And if he’d been there when the Internet was invented…” and the crowd roared.

A great place to find humor is in the souvenirs for sale. In Boston, the site of the 2004 Democratic convention that nominated John Kerry, you could buy anti-Bush buttons that said, “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot,” and, “If you can read this, you’re not the President.”

On a more sobering note, the opening night of that convention offered a tribute to the victims of 9/11, the New York skyline projected on a huge stage, delegates holding miniature flashlights, a 16-year-old fiddler playing “Amazing Grace.”

It was, of course, moving, but an experience I had at that year’s GOP convention in New York was for me even more emotional.

One afternoon I joined Governor and Mrs. Carcieri and several other Rhode Islanders on a visit to a 20th-floor office overlooking ground zero. We were in the headquarters of the September 11th Families’ Association. Lee Ielpi, a 60-year-old retired New York firefighter, stood by a window that looked down on the World Trade Center pit and offered an agonizing account of the horrors of the attack and its aftermath.

As the ghastly catastrophe of that 2001 day began to unfold, his firefighter son Jonathan called to say he was heading for the site. Ielpi rushed to find him amid the hell and then enlisted in the long recovery effort.

Three months into it, he arrived home at about 9:30 p.m. and received a call that Jonathan had been located.

Now Ielpi and another son, Brendan, also a firefighter, went to the scene.

At the convention press center, I sat at a computer and transcribed the following passage from Ielpi’s account:

“There was a ramp that went over the rubble … My son, Brendan, and I were able to come here. And all the world stops when we had whole bodies, or something that would resemble a whole body, and people would line up on each side of this makeshift ramp. And I went down with my son, Brendan, and we were able to collect Jonathan. He was already in a basket and — I’ve got to stop for a second — so we were able to go down, spend a little time … and then Brendan and myself and some of the guys in Jon’s company — we carried him up, put him in an ambulance and took Jon away…. We were blessed in a way, because my son was a whole body.”

When I turned to a colleague in New York and read these quotes aloud, my voice cracked. And just now, retyping them in Providence, my eyes well up.

In trips to 13 conventions during four different decades, I heard president after president, nominee after nominee, show biz star after show biz star. Still, it was the words from Ielpi that packed the biggest wallop.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com