Three Delegates, Decades Apart in Age, Converge at the Democratic Convention

Among the nearly 4,700 delegates gathered in Chicago this week for the Democratic National Convention: United States senators and representatives. Top state officials. Leaders of major advocacy groups and labor unions. Democrats aspiring to become one or more of the above.

And hundreds of people with full-time jobs unrelated to politics, known only within their communities for the political work they do in their spare time.

The youngest delegates are teenagers attending their first convention before they have even voted in their first general election. The oldest have well over a dozen conventions under their belts.

Here are three of them.

Polly Baca was in Chicago when it exploded: standing inside the Blackstone Hotel on Aug. 28, 1968, looking down at baton-wielding police officers storming through a protest that she had been part of minutes before.

She was 27, and it had been a traumatic year. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Ms. Baca, an employee of Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, had been at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Mr. Kennedy was killed. Brimming with grief and anger, she arrived in Mexico City to see her sister just as the police there attacked student demonstrators.