Focus: What’s it like for ordinary citizens to be highlighted in a presidential speech?

Often the phone call is met with disbelief. The White House?

“I thought maybe it was a prank,” said Val Myteberi.

The White House was on the line to talk about a letter her 6-year-old son had written to President Barack Obama. The president was touched by the letter, she was told. He might want to mention the boy in a speech at the United Nations.

“I couldn’t talk,” Myteberi said. “I started crying.”

Obama liked to highlight everyday Americans in his speeches, connecting their stories, their lives, to his policies and programs.

“Nothing captures the imagination and helps people understand the impacts and possibilities like hearing about people who live them every day,” said Terry Szuplat, who as one of Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters conceived and drafted hundreds of talks on a variety of subjects over the past eight years.

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In reaching out to people who might be featured in a presidential address, “it always starts with a request,” Szuplat said. “We never include someone without their permission. They’ll be going from anonymity to the national spotlight. It can be a life-changing experience.”

Here’s what it was like for four of them.

Alex Myteberi

The 6-year-old boy in Scarsdale, N.Y., climbed onto his mother Val’s bed one day last August when she was reading a news story on her phone about the civil war in Syria. He caught glimpses of a photo and video of Omran Daqneesh, a boy close to his own age, whose face was covered in dust and blood after being pulled from the rubble of an airstrike.

“Who is he?” Alex asked his mom. “Did he find his family?” She calmed him as best she could, but he wouldn’t let it go. A few days later, he wrote a letter to Obama. “Remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria? Can you please go get him and bring him to our home? We will give him a family and he will be our brother.”

The White House receives thousands of letters every day. Szuplat said a team goes through them, and 10 are sent every night to the president, “some of them flattering, some of them not.” Through that process, Szuplat heard about Alex’s letter. He was working on a speech about refugees. “The moment I read it,” he said, “I knew it would work with what we were trying to say.”

Leading up to the speech, the family was told — as they all are — that there was no guarantee Obama would talk about Alex. But at the end of his 20-minute speech to the Leaders Summit on Refugees at the United Nations on Sept. 20, the president read excerpts from the letter and said:

“The humanity that a young child can display, who hasn’t learned to be cynical, or suspicious, or fearful of other people because of where they’re from, or how they look, or how they pray, and who just understands the notion of treating somebody that is like him with compassion, with kindness — we can all learn from Alex.”

That night, the White House posted on its website a video of Alex reading the letter at the kitchen table where he had written it. Soon, 10 million people had viewed it. Reporters from around the world called to do stories. Alex was invited to appear at the Global Citizen Festival in New York, a huge annual concert. He went to the White House and met the president.

It got overwhelming at times, Val Myteberi said, and some of the reader comments posted on media stories about Alex’s letter have been vulgar and threatening. But they would do it all again. “For the rest of our lives,” she said, “we will never forget this honor.”

Alison Crowther

For a while, he was known only as The Man in the Red Bandanna, a stranger who saved the lives of at least 12 people by ushering them to safety after terrorists hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He died when the tower collapsed.

His name was Welles Crowther. He was 24.

He was Alison Crowther’s son.

Like a lot of people who lost loved ones in the attack, she wanted to be there when the 9/11 Museum was dedicated on May 15, 2014. But tickets were limited, and a lottery was used.

Months before the event, a museum official called and asked if she was going to attend. “If we win tickets,” replied Crowther, a Realtor in New York. A second call followed with the same question. Then several more, all nibbling around the edges of her plans for the dedication.

Finally she was told Obama might attend. She had met the president before, at another event with 9/11 families, and now she was instructed to expect a call from Szuplat. The speechwriter wanted more information about her son and what he did that day.

“In those awful moments after the South Tower was hit, some of the injured huddled in the wreckage of the 78th floor,” Obama said at the dedication. “The fires were spreading. The air was filled with smoke. It was dark, and they could barely see. It seemed as if there was no way out.

“And then there came a voice — clear, calm, saying he had found the stairs. A young man in his 20s, strong, emerged from the smoke, and over his nose and his mouth he wore a red handkerchief.”

Crowther said she was “completely overwhelmed by what he said.”

“I was just so deeply touched that Welles would be remembered that way, by the president of the United States, on the world stage,” she said.

Afterward, she heard from friends who had seen the speech or media coverage of it, including one who told her she was on the front page of newspapers in Paris, in a photo, being hugged by Obama.

“It was just the most astonishing experience,” she said.

Cory Remsburg

The first time Cory Remsburg met the president, in 2009, they were both at the 65th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France. Remsburg, an Army Ranger, had just parachuted out of an airplane to commemorate the historic World War II invasion. They shook hands and chatted.

The next time they met, a year later, Sgt. Remsburg was in a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He’d been grievously injured by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. He’d been blinded in one eye, couldn’t walk or talk. Obama was there visiting wounded service members, as he did regularly during his presidency, and noticed on the wall a photo of himself and Remsburg from Normandy.

“We believe that Cory is the only service member to meet President Obama both before and after his injuries in combat,” Szuplat said. They’ve now had seven meetings, and in several speeches Obama has featured Remsburg as an example of someone who refuses to give up. At the 2014 State of the Union address, after the president singled him out, he received a standing ovation.

In 2015, on the day Remsburg moved into a new home in Phoenix, Obama surprised him with a visit. Last year, Remsburg returned the favor, walking into the Oval Office to show the president the progress he’s made in his recovery.

“I always defer to Cory on whether he wants to be in the media or be part of a speech,” said his father, Craig Remsburg. “What he thinks about is, “Will this help a group of people or someone who is having a hard time?’ If it will, he does it.”

He said his son “doesn’t get too wrapped up in all of this.” Once, after watching on a laptop computer an Obama speech that mentioned him, Remsburg turned to his father and said, “I’m hungry.”

But the relationship with Obama has changed their lives, Craig Remsburg said. They travel frequently, almost two dozen times a year, so his son can make inspirational appearances and talks at sporting events and fundraisers for wounded veterans.

“It made something positive out of something so bad,” Craig Remsburg said. “It has helped my son to keep pushing on.”

Sean Casey

The semi-retired Solana Beach software engineer with a pre-existing medical condition calls himself “an early adopter” of the Affordable Care Act.

By the fall of 2013, with the law due to take effect the following January, he had researched how it was going to work and realized his premiums would drop from more than $30,000 to less than $9,000 annually — money that would help offset the cost of his daughter’s first year in college.

When a rollout of the Affordable Care website ran into glitches and sparked outrage, Casey thought Obama “might want to hear a positive message from someone.” He emailed a letter through the White House website: “Please keep fighting for the ACA.”

He joked to himself, “Maybe I’ll be invited to the State of the Union.”

He wasn’t, but on April 1, 2014, in remarks in the White House Rose Garden, Obama cited Casey as an example of what the health law “has meant for millions of our fellow Americans.”

Casey heard the talk at the county courthouse in Vista, where he was on jury duty. He turned off his phone, spent the afternoon in a courtroom, and when he turned the phone back on, it started buzzing. Other people had heard the talk, too.

All the local TV stations sent reporters to his house. He was quoted in The San Diego Union-Tribune, interviewed by radio stations. He was invited to a local Democratic Party gathering and got recognized by a few people around town for about a week.

“And that was the end of it,” he said. “It was really just a one-day furor. But that one day was crazy.”

Even though his premiums “have been creeping up,” he remains on the policy. “I’m happy with the way things are now,” he said, “and hopefully they won’t change in a way that makes me unhappy.”