The next time I met Sen. Obama was at a campaign stop in Union, MO, during the summer of 2008. It was a rainy day for a picnic in the park, and when I found a shiny new 2008 penny in the pavillion parking lot, I knew it was a sign. So when my turn came for the Senator to serve me a hamburger, I gave him the penny and told him he was going to win in November. Looking straight at me as if we were the only two people on Earth, he asked my name. When I reached up to hug him, he leaned over the counter full of hot dogs and hamburgers and met me half way. I turned to a friend who was taking photos, patted my chest and said, "Be still my heart." The Senator's face lit up with that luminous smile of his, and I remember thinking that this is a man who sincerely cares about others.
So why am I sharing this story with you? Because there have been so many lies about him spread by deceitful and selfish people that I want to share some facts about Obama's early years. I know facts don't matter to people who hate from the core of their being, but at least some of us will remember what the little boy from Hawaii was like as a child and see some of those same traits in our President.
I also feel a special connection to our President because my husband's maternal ancestors shared the same last name as Obama's maternal ancestors, and both families were from Southeast Kansas. Madelyn Payne married Stanley Dunham after World War II and from this union was born a daughter, Stanley Ann Dunham. She was named Stanley because her mother particularly adored Bette Davis and a character named Stanley that Davis played in a movie. Mr. Dunham had great hopes for making it big in business and moved the family several times before ending up in the Seattle area.
Friends of Stanley Ann's from Mercer Island High School remember a very bright young lady with a sharp wit, an honor student who was program director of the French Club, who worked on the yearbook and belonged to a service club called the Mercer Girls. Coincidentally, she was also an avid basketball fan. At five foot six, she was slightly taller than average, had a bright smile, eyes that twinkled when she talked and "a wonderful laugh that started deep in her throat." (p. 129)
Stanley Ann's parents were not overly political, but they were open to new ways of thinking. They often attended the University Unitarian Church in Seattle and sometimes the East Shore Unitarian Church in Bellevue. Her father liked meeting new people and asking a lot of questions, a trait he passed on to his daughter. Throughout her life, Stanley Ann always looked for the good in people wherever she lived regardless of how they treated her. She saw the world through the lens of the anthropologist she would some day become and recognized the universal needs of people everywhere.
Stanley Ann would have preferred to attend college with her friends in Washington, but her father had a job offer in Hawaii he couldn't turn down. She enrolled in the University of Hawaii and met Barack Hussein Obama from Kenya in a Russian class. Maraniss describes Obama Sr. as so intelligent and charismatic that groups of students showed up wherever he was discussing the topic of the day. Stanley Ann was captivated by him and the two became very close fairly quickly. When Stanley Ann told her parents she was pregnant and wanted to get married, they were not happy about it. But Madelyn had run off and secretly married Stan Dunham when she was still in high school, so what could they say? Between semesters, the young couple flew from Honolulu to Maui and were married in the county courthouse on February 2, 1961.
The couple couldn't afford to maintain a home together, so Obama Sr. kept his small apartment, and Stanley Ann continued to live with her parents. When she gave birth at Kapi'olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, a funny story circulated around the hospital that "Stanley had a baby." Maraniss interviewed a journalist who was friends with one of the doctors who delivered babies at that hospital and who had heard the joke from colleagues. For the record, the doctor who delivered the baby was David A. Sinclair. Coincidentally, that journalist would become a lifelong friend of Stanley Ann's and later a teacher in the school Barack Jr. attended. On the birth certificate, the mother's race was listed as Caucasian and the father's African. So Barack Hussein Obama II was born a hapa meaning someone who is half one race and half another. Hawaii, our newest state, was, and still is, full of hapa people. (p. 163)
Within a month after the birth, mother and baby were long gone from Hawaii and back on the mainland with friends on Mercer Island. Stanley Ann, who was going by just Ann at this time, registered at the University of Washington that fall. Maraniss offers several possibilities about why Ann left. The most likely one is that Ann found out her husband already had a wife and children in Kenya. When she asked him about that, he told her it was the custom for the husband to just say he divorced a wife and that was all that was necessary legally. That may have been legal in Kenya, but it wasn't in the U.S. Barack Obama Sr. later married again in Kenya and that wife described in long interviews how the man deteriorated because of his drinking and abusive behavior. It was a car accident that finally claimed the life of the man who fathered the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Keep in mind this young mother was still only 18 years old when she flew to Washington State with her tiny baby. Friends describe Anna Obama (as she was listed in the Polk directory) as "so confident and self-assured and relaxed." (p. 176) The neighbor who often babysat Barry, as he was called then, remembered him as being "very large and very curious and very alert." (p. 177) That fall, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama received a B in Modern Government and an A in Introduction to Man. (For those who aren't old enough to remember, human beings were grouped together as "mankind" back then. So it was natural that an intro anthropology course would be called Intro to Man.) By the following summer, with a GPA of 3.75, Ann was ready to return to Hawaii. Her husband left that summer for Harvard. In January 1964, Ann filed for divorce on the grounds of grievous mental suffering, was granted custody and did not ask for child support. The boy's father was granted visitation rights, but, for all practical purposes, it was Barack's grandfather, Stan Dunham, who played the father role from then on.
In Miss Kazuko Sakai's kindergarten class, Barry was described as being calm and observant, if a bit shy. Because of his size, he was placed in the back row. One of the student teachers described how, when there was a commotion of some sort, he would "crane his neck and smile, but he wouldn't get involved."
By this time, Ann had met and married another foreign student at U of Hawaii, Soetoro Martodihardjo, an Indonesian who went by the nickname Lolo. He dropped the last name and became Lolo Soetoro. Already a college graduate, Lolo was a trained geographer with a specialty in mapping and map interpretation. Barry was two and a half when Lolo entered the scene. Ann finally graduated in August 1967 and prepared to join her husband in Indonesia.
Ann and Barry arrived in Jakarta in October 1967. He was barely six, and his mother was almost 25. Despite being considered in the professional class, Lolo could afford only a little house with no air-conditioning, four rooms, a primitive toilet and a white iron fence around the front yard. The backyard was a veritable zoo with chickens, coskatoos, snakes, turtles, two biawaks in a pond and a small ape named Tata. Neighbors recall Barry in the front yard jumping up to see over the fence at passersby. His mother spent her first few days introducing herself to her neighbors. One of the few neighbors who spoke English was a woman who worked for the World Council of Churches. Some of the people Maraniss interviewed for the book remember little Barry as a big eater who wasn't afraid to try new food and who loved playing with the neighbor children.
Ann asked around about the best school for Barry and a Catholic one was recommended. So Barry was enrolled in SD Katolik Santo Fransiskus Assisi which was three blocks from their house and had an enrollment of just over 200 students. He entered first grade in January 1968. Since Barry was the only student who couldn't speak Bahasa Indonesia that first year, he was placed with a teach who understood English. Most of the neighbors and his fellow students assumed Barry was Ambonese, a darker skinned group of Indonesians. Barry was registered at school as a Muslim because his step-father was nominally Muslim. Lolo was not particularly religious, but the form required something to fill in the blank. Ann was a spiritual humanist who taught her young son a "disdain for ignorance and arrogance." (p. 217) By the end of the first grade, he knew the stories of the Bible and how to sing national songs. His best subject was arithmetic which didn't require as much language ability.
Barry offered to clean the blackboard and run errands for the teacher. Because of his size, he was given the task of lining the students up before class and before recess. He was a generous teammate on the playing field. Again because of his size, he could reach a ball ahead of the other students and then give it to a smaller student to throw back to the infield.
In another example of young Barry's generous nature, Maraniss describes how, as a third-grader, Barry helped another boy whose father had been assigned to Australia for four years. Although an Indonesian himself, the boy did not understand Bahasa Indonesia. Barry brought him one of his English-language correspondence workbooks from Calvert School in Baltimore and helped the new student convert the English words to Bahasa.
Life wasn't all fun and games, however, and the young boy was exposed to hardships and cruel life-changing events all around him. "A man without a nose. A baby who died from evil spirits. Barefoot farmers in barren fields." He was learning that life was often unpredictable and cruel. (p. 223) Maraniss offers the opinion that the years in Indonesia taught the future president about the gulf between the rich and the poor, "a condition stark and constant, unavoidable even in the life of a little boy." (p. 244)
When Lolo's job situation improved, the family moved to a better neighborhood and Barry enrolled in SD Besuki, named for the street it was on. His new classmates were sons and daughters of lawyers, bankers, doctors, members of Parliament and government officials. This is the school that people who dislike our President call a Muslim training ground for terrorists. Not true. In fact, the myth that Barack Obama was from Muslim roots is just that - a myth. The truth is that his Kenyan grandfather converted to Islam in order to get a better job but did not follow its precepts. His life was actually more directly shaped by Christian missionaries. Barack Obama Sr. was not a Muslim but an atheist. Lolo Soetoro was born and raised a Muslim but was not religious. In fact, the first time the family visited Lolo's family in Yogyakarta, they went to church on Christmas Eve. SD Besuki in the early 1970's was a public elementary school considered among the academic elite. The students were a mix of Christian and Muslim, and the holidays for both religions were celebrated. One of Barry's classmates interviewed for Maraniss' book, Dewi Asmara, told the author that all the students mingled and didn't know about the Muslim-Christian dichotomy. (p. 238)
Barry's mother was keeping busy studying Indonesian culture and was beginning to doubt that her second marriage would continue for many years. She had given birth to a daughter, Maya, who would spend most of her young years at her mother's side. But the 10 year old Barry was taken back to Honolulu to his grandparents to continue his education. He was Barry Obama again and could go back to speaking English. It was only because of his grandparents' connections that he was admitted to the most prestigious school in Hawaii, Punahou. Tuition for a fifth-grader in 1971 was $1,165, three times as much as a semester at the University of Hawaii. Although Barry did well on the entrance exam, his family could not have afforded the tuition. His grandmother's boss at the bank where she worked was on Punahou's board, and Stan's boss at the insurance company where he worked was a wealthy alumnus.
Ann Obama Soetoro returned to Honolulu the following fall to continue working toward her PhD in anthropology. As it happened, her advisor was Alice Dewey, granddaughter of the famous educator and author, John Dewey. With the help of student grants and a part time job as a handicraft instructor at the Bishop Museum, Ann was able to complete her course work. She, Barry and Maya lived in a small apartment five blocks from Stan and Madelyn.
One of Barry's teachers at Punahou recalled the young man as being very courteous and well behaved. He said Barry always had a smile and was nice without being obnoxious. Outside of school, the young man's passion was basketball, and he and his Choom Gang friends spent every minute they could at the school courts. Despite some teenage pranks and good times, most of the boys in Obama's social group went on to become successful professionals.
One of the Gang remembered how "Barry had the ability to project cool...that calm, almost nonchalance. It was part of the image thing, not just him but just generally in Hawaii...." (p. 298) "Growing up hapa, living with white relatives but appearing black and being treated black by society at large, he learned by necessity how to navigate in different worlds and mastered the distinct vocabularies required to connect and thrive in each of them." (p. 302)
The Punahou basketball coach, Chris McLachlin, was probably as much of an influence on Obama as anyone outside his family. The Coach allowed no excuses and drilled in the players' heads that they always had to have Plan B. If someone's car broke down on the way to practice, he'd better have another ride lined up. No excuses. The boys had to perform to the best of their ability. Period.
Obama was not an eager student but did well in his classes. He obviously preferred basketball and hanging out with his friends. The campus library had a good collection of books by African-American authors, and Obama checked them out and read them all. He later recalled in Dreams of My Father that he found those black authors "trapped in despair or anger" particularly when reaching back to the violence of the period of slavery. "There was no violent history in the white blood that ran through Barry Obama. His skin color defined him to much of American society, but his personal history was different, without the same emotional baggage. He had no female ancestors raped by white slave owners. His African father came to America of his own volition, on scholarship, part of a freedom movement in Kenya.
My hope as I write this on November 2, 2012, is that Barack Obama wins a second term as President of the United States of America. My hope for the future is that historians will describe how badly this President was treated by segments of the population and that those stories will be shocking to readers in decades hence.
Susan Cunningham
Pacific, MO
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