Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  For Christmas, Obama gave Barry his first basketball. But the end of the month was fast approaching. Obama failed to look up his old Honolulu friends Neil Abercrombie and Andy “Pake” Zane, and when he was with his son, “he never pushed me to speak,” Barry later recounted. “It was only during the course of that month—by the end of that month—that I think I started to open myself up to understanding who he was. But then he was gone, and I never saw him again.”27

  Right after New Year’s, Ann applied for a new U.S. passport in order to “return home” to Jakarta on January 14, 1972. She listed her stay there as “indefinite,” but within a month she made the first of three requests that spring 1972 for UDub to send copies of her old 1961–62 transcript to University of Hawaii’s graduate school. In Honolulu, Barry immediately started putting his favorite Christmas present to good use, playing basketball with his good friend Mark Hebing, among others, sometimes at several courts on King Street only a block or so south of his grandparents’ apartment building.

  His math and science teacher, Pal Eldredge, would remember fifth-grade Barry as “a happy kid. He had a good sense of humor and was smiling all the time,” as virtually every photo of young Obama from that time confirms. “He was a rascal too—he had a little spunk to him,” Eldredge adds, but “he was always smiling” and was “a good student—he related well with everybody.” Obama Sr.’s old buddy Neil Abercrombie, now at work on a Ph.D. dissertation and holding down a variety of odd jobs, would run into Stan Dunham and Stan’s grandson several times that spring. “When I would see them, Stanley would offer how bright Barry was and how well he was doing in school. He had ambitions for little Barry,” Abercrombie remembered. “It was obvious to everybody and certainly must have been obvious to little Barry that his grandfather not only loved him but, more importantly, liked him and liked having him around and liked him as a pal.”

  By September 1972, when Barry began sixth grade, Ann and now-two-year-old Maya had returned to Honolulu from Jakarta so that Ann could begin graduate study in anthropology that fall at UH, thanks to a grant from the Asia Foundation. Ann and both of her children lived in apartment #3 at 1839 Poki Street, only one short block west of Punahou. A classmate who sat beside Barry remembered a “chubby-cheeked boy” who was “articulate, bright, funny, and kind.” Sixth-grade coursework added “oceanography, electricity and atomic structure” to the science class and also introduced students to “the use and abuse of drugs.” In addition, one week at Camp Timberline gave the class an opportunity to try archery and horseback riding; four decades later homeroom teacher Betty Morioka still had a photograph showing a pensive Barry in an oversized gray T-shirt, a rare instance of a picture in which he was not smiling broadly. Young Obama’s clearest memory was of a Jewish camp counselor who described the time he had spent in Israel.

  Not long after the end of that sixth-grade year, Ann, Madelyn, Barry, and Maya set off on a long tour of the American West. They first flew to Seattle—Ann’s first time back there, or anywhere else on the mainland, since her return to Hawaii eleven years earlier—and then headed south down the West Coast. From Disneyland, in Southern California, they headed east to the Grand Canyon, then to Kansas City, where Madelyn’s sister Arlene was teaching at the University of Missouri. From there it was north to Chicago, then back westward to Yellowstone National Park and San Francisco before returning to Honolulu. Ann told a friend the trek was “pretty exhausting” since “we traveled by bus most of the way.” Her son remembered chasing bison at Yellowstone, but also the “shrunken heads—real shrunken heads” at Chicago’s Field Museum. “That was actually the highlight. That was almost as good as Disneyland.”

  As summer ended, Ann wrote to an old friend in Seattle to say that “I do hope to spend most of my time for the next few years in the islands, since my son Barry is doing very well in school here, and I hate to take him abroad again till he graduates, which won’t be for another 6 years.” In seventh grade Barry began foreign language (French) instruction, and his other classes would also now be taught by departmental specialists. Barry’s homeroom was in 102 Bishop Hall with Joyce Kang; a yearbook photo of the group labeled “Mixed Races of America” declared, “Whether you’re a [Sarah] Tmora, a [Pam] Ching, or an Obama, we share the same world.” A girl who had pre-algebra and other seventh- and eighth-grade classes with Barry remembered him as “boisterously funny and a big, good-hearted tease” who had “a variety of friends and activities,” one of which was now tennis. Throughout these years, Barry spent a good deal of time at Punahou’s tennis courts, and one classmate, Kristen B. Caldwell, later wrote and spoke about one incident that remained painfully clear in her memory.

  A chart of who would play whom in some tournament had just been posted by Tom Mauch, Punahou’s tennis pro. Mauch, then in his early forties, had come to Punahou in 1967 from Northern California’s East Bay. Barry and other students were running their fingers along the chart when Mauch told him, “Don’t touch that, you’ll get it dirty!” In Caldwell’s memory, “he singled him out, and the implication was absolutely clear: Barry’s hands weren’t grubby; the message was that his darker skin would somehow soil” the diagram. “I could tell it upset Barry,” she recalled, but “he said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ with just a perfect amount of iciness to get his point across.” Mauch fumbled for a response. “Nothing—I was making a joke.”

  Only once, in 1995, would Obama himself expressly refer to the incident with the tennis pro. In subsequent years, aside from one unspecific allusion, Obama never mentioned the exchange to any interviewers. Contacted forty years later and asked for the very first time if he remembered Obama, Tom Mauch refused to talk about his years at Punahou.

  Barry’s eighth-grade year featured one semester of Government and Living in a World of Change and one of Christian Ethics instead of social studies. “Biblical faith is placed in the context of the world in which we live” while examining “the relationship between faith and the everyday experiences of life,” Punahou’s catalog explained. For French, Barry had his former homeroom teacher, now Joyce Kang Torrey.

  In the fall, a still-chubby Barry played defensive end on the intermediate football team coached by Pal Eldredge, his fifth-grade teacher. According to Punahou’s catalog, the yearlong science class stressed “human physiology and health . . . drug and sex education are part of the curriculum as the need and interest are manifested.” Toward the end of the school year, on April 30, an evening open house called “Science ’75” featured eighth graders’ second-semester science projects. Barry’s was titled “Effects of Music on Plants,” though his friend Mark Bendix’s “The Effect of Aerosol Spray on Plants” was probably easier to execute.28

  During Barry’s eighth-grade year, Ann finished her graduate coursework, passed her Ph.D. qualifying exams, and gave up the Poki Street apartment to return to Indonesia with four-year-old Maya. She and Lolo had informally separated in mid-1974, and Ann would later record that Lolo did not contribute to her or Maya’s support after that time, though her relationship with both him and his parents remained caring and cordial. With her departure from Honolulu, Barry moved back in with his grandparents, who in 1973 had moved from their twelfth-floor apartment to unit 1008 in the same building. Barry spent the summer of 1975 in Indonesia with Ann and Maya before returning to Honolulu in August before his ninth-grade year.

  Punahou spoke of its four high school years as “the Academy,” and many new students entered for ninth grade, bringing each annual class to 400 to 425 students, or twenty homerooms of twenty students apiece. Barry’s new homeroom teacher was Eric Kusunoki, a 1967 Punahou graduate who remembered calling the official roll the very first day and having Obama respond, “Just call me Barry.” The biggest change from prior grades was the Academy’s unusual six-day variable modular schedule that principal Win Healy had instituted four years earlier: days were A-B-C-D-E-F, not Monday through Friday. That arrangement left students with considerable free time between classes on s
ome days, and Barry usually devoted as much of that time as possible to pickup basketball.

  “He always had a basketball in his hands and was always looking for a pickup game,” classmate Larry Tavares remembered. Barry later recalled having his worst grade ever—a D in French—that year, and his other classes ranged from speech to boys’ chorus to one on Europe. Classmate Whitey Kahoohanohano recounts that “Barry was happy-go-lucky. A prankster. A tease. He liked to have fun. I remember him giggling a lot. He was real pleasant” and “smart.” Another, Sharon Yanagi, indicates that Barry’s basic persona had not changed at all from previous years: “he was always smiling.”

  During his ninth-grade year, Barry began a serious friendship with two older African American students, senior Tony Peterson and junior Rik Smith. Tony was only in his second year at Punahou, but as one younger student stressed, “people looked up to Tony. He was a real smart guy.” One day a week, Tony, Rik, and Barry would meet up on the steps of Cooke Hall, right outside the attendance office. Tony later said that much of their interaction involved “standing around trying to impress each other with how smart we are.”

  Although biracial, Rik already firmly identified as black and felt that racism most definitely existed in Hawaii. “Punahou was an amazing school,” he said years later, “but it could be a lonely place.” In his mind, “those of us who were black did feel isolated.” Tony did not entirely share Rik’s attitude. “For black people, there was not a lot of discrimination against us.” The three of them “talked about race but not, I thought, out of a deep sense of pain,” he explained.

  One spring morning, to help with an English assignment, Tony recorded some of the trio’s conversation. Rik asked “What is time?” and fourteen-year-old Barry responded that “time is just a collection of human experiences combined so that they make a long, flowing stream of thought.” At the end of that school year, Barry wrote in Tony’s 1976 Oahuan yearbook: “Tony, man, I am sure glad I got to know you before you left. All those Ethnic Corner trips to the snack bar and playing ball made the year a lot more enjoyable, even though the snack bar trips cost me a fortune.” Playing off of some prior conversation, Barry also told Tony to “get that law degree. Some day when I am a pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I’ll call on you.”29

  Ann had intended for Barry to once again come to Indonesia for the summer. She and Maya had been living with Lolo’s mother in Jogyakarta rather than the capital so she could pursue her doctoral research. “What an enjoyable city it is, especially as compared with Jakarta!” she wrote her University of Hawaii dissertation adviser, Alice Dewey. But in May, she had changed their plans, and in mid-June she and Maya flew to Honolulu, staying at Dewey’s home while Barry continued to live with his grandparents. Stanley was still working at the insurance agency, but his two best friends there, Alec Williamson and Rolf Nordahl, could tell how unfulfilling and oftentimes unpleasant he found the work. “During the day, there wasn’t a whole lot of business” with potential customers not at home, Nordahl recalled, and he and Stan would chat and often at lunchtime go make sandwiches at the Dunhams’ apartment. More than once, Rolf heard Stan mention the Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Released in December 1967, it starred the black Bahamian American actor Sidney Poitier as Dr. John Wade Prentice of Hawaii, whose white fiancée brings him home to meet her parents. “Well, I lived it,” Stan would explain.

  On evenings when the two men were finished with customer calls, they often went to Bob’s Soul Food Place or the Family Inn bar on Honolulu’s Smith Street, in the city’s well-known red-light district. “Stanley did not have a great deal of success” selling life insurance, mainly because of his “call reluctance,” Nordahl explained. “There’s nothing worse than calling somebody and wanting to talk to them about life insurance . . . it’s the last thing anybody wants to talk about.” But Stanley was committed to sticking with the job and wanted to “come up to snuff with Madelyn . . . I know that bothered him.” To Nordahl, “he spoke very fondly of her” and gave no sign that his job difficulties altered his personality. “He always had a joke” and seemed like “a very, very happy man—always a big smile. I wouldn’t say that I saw any unhappiness at all.”

  Stanley also “wanted to learn more about black people,” Rolf knew, and that influenced his and his grandson’s ongoing visits with Frank Marshall Davis. Barry later described Frank’s “big dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar.” Stan’s close relationship with Frank also generated his own interest in writing poetry, something he regularly talked about with Alec Williamson.

  “He loved science fiction,” Williamson recalled, and “we talked a lot of politics.” Stan “did not like Nixon,” would “argue the liberal side,” and often brought his grandson by the office during his late middle school years. Barry “was a good kid . . . well-educated . . . I liked him.” Stan was indeed “something of a poet,” and more than thirty-five years later Williamson still had copies of, and indeed could recite, two deeply poignant ones:

  Life

  Oh, where have they gone

  Those days of our youth

  With those wonderful dreams

  Of worlds to be won

  When life was a search

  For the ultimate truth

  Full of adventure

  And, Oh, so much fun

  Win all our battles

  We just couldn’t fail

  For then right was right

  It just had to prevail

  Then came life’s middle years

  Impending old age with all of its fears

  The many missed chances

  The oft shed tears

  Till hope at last dwindles

  And disappears

  Then comes rebirth

  For ’tis Nature’s way

  The circle’s full round

  Life’s dawned a new day

  Erase life’s slate clean

  But sell not your shares

  For hope still survives

  In our children, and in theirs

  And if not, SO WHAT!

  —STANLEY A. DUNHAM

  The second, brief, untitled one spoke to home:

  Man can span the oceans of space

  Split the atom. Win the race

  But all is for naught when against his wishes

  He has to help with the dinner dishes.

  —STANLEY A. DUNHAM

  Williamson and Nordahl agreed that “Stan was a great guy,” and “we had a lot of good times together.” Pal Eldredge at Punahou had exactly the same impression. Both Stan and Madelyn came to “most of the activities” and “any kind of performances we had.” Stan “was a fun guy” and “they were always here with” Barry, Eldredge remembered. “It was always good to be around him because he was always joking with people.” Ann’s mentor Alice Dewey felt similarly: Stanley was a “very charming and fun person, and very affectionate.”

  Madelyn, particularly at work, was far less outgoing and seemingly far less happy, though her professional success far eclipsed her husband’s. One young management trainee from the 1970s, who later became Bank of Hawaii’s vice chairman, bluntly acknowledged, “I was afraid of her. She definitely intimidated me. If you were new and still learning, she was like a drill sergeant.” Another young man remembered similarly: “We were afraid of her because she was so gruff.” Two women had comparable experiences. To Naomi Komenaka, Madelyn was “demanding, sharp and feisty”; to Myrtle Choan, one of Madelyn’s direct deputies, “she was a tough lady. Tough, tough lady . . . I was so afraid of her. I called her Mrs. Dunham, never by her first name.”

  At home, though, Madelyn was as devoted to Barry as Stan was; Barry called her “Tut,” with a long “oo” sound, after a common Hawaiian term for grandmother, tutu. Her brother Charles recalled her t
elling him well before Barry’s high school years that he was a genius; on one of the few occasions she ever spoke publicly about her grandson, she remembered him as “just a basketball-happy little boy. . . . I think his ambition when he was young was to be a pro basketball player, but he didn’t grow tall enough.”

  In their modest apartment, Barry’s tiny bedroom was hardly six feet by eight feet, according to Stan’s brother Ralph, who visited them in Hawaii at that time. “It was about the size of a jail cell.” Stan took Ralph along to his regular chess and checkers club, and also took him to meet Frank Marshall Davis. Along with Stan and young Barry, “we had a terrific time,” Ralph recounted years later. Even close family members did not understand why Stan and Madelyn remained in the small apartment at 1617 South Beretania. Madelyn’s brother Charles believed Stan thought it was perfectly fine, but that his sister did not like it. It was a “pretty depressing” building and “not where a bank vice president would live.”30

  For Barry’s tenth-grade year, Literature & Writing used the traditional Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition. A full year of science was required, as was at least one semester of a course on Asia. Tony Peterson had graduated, and seemingly taking his place for Barry was Keith Kakugawa, now a senior, with whom Obama had been acquainted since Keith first arrived at Punahou three years earlier. With a half-Japanese, half–native Hawaiian father who worked as an exterminator, and a half-black and half–Native American mother, Kakugawa personified the islands’ rich mix of ethnicities. Bright, an excellent athlete, particularly in track, and blessed with an excellent memory, Kakugawa lived well west of Honolulu in working-class Pearl City, just north of the famous Pearl Harbor navy base.