4um: Former classmates remember Obama's mother as 'uncommon'

Title: Former classmates remember Obama's mother as 'uncommon'
Source: Sunday Gazette-Mail
URL Source: [None]
Published: Apr 13, 2008
Author: Jonathan Martin
Post Date: 2008-05-21 14:54:47 by Jethro Tull
Keywords: None
Views: 320
Comments: 19

Former classmates remember Obama's mother as 'uncommon'

SEATTLE - For four years on Mercer Island, Stanley Ann Dunham impressed her high-school classmates with a wickedly sharp wit. She was an "intellectual rebel" with a fledgling beatnik sensibility that would eventually take her around the globe.

However, shortly after high school graduation in 1960, she vanished from the Seattle area, and would have been little more than a foggy memory to most - if not for a son she had just a year later: Barack Obama

Now that Obama's unique personal history has become part of his rising political profile, his mother's formative years in the Pacific Northwest are a little-noticed chapter. Even Obama glosses over the chapter in a single line in his best-selling biography.

Dunham, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, is described as the "most dominant figure" in Obama's life. Obama's half-sister says Dunham remembered her teen years on Mercer Island so fondly that she wanted to attend college in Seattle. Instead, her parents took her after high school to Hawaii, where Obama was born.

"Her life showed a deep respect for intellectual rigor and perhaps an uncommon sense of learning," said Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who lives in Hawaii.

Now that Obama is leading the fight to become the Democratic nominee for president, Dunham's classmates are remembering her again. In the Eisenhower era of poodle skirts and Ozzie and Harriet, she preferred jazz, refused to baby-sit and viewed education - not marriage - as the key to her future.

Few of them saw Dunham after she left for Hawaii, but they still see much of her in her famous son: her eyes, her chin, her broad- minded globalism, her intellectual rigor.

"You see her in his expressions, how he handles adulation," said Marylyn Prosser of Ketchum, Idaho, a former classmate.

"I get a sense he is grounded, and that reminds me of his mother."

'She was not a standard-issue girl'

As Obama has climbed the political ladder, one particular anecdote about his mother is repeated: that her father, Stanley Armour Dunham, Obama's grandfather, gave his only child his first name because he wanted a boy.

Stanley Ann went to elementary school in Kansas before her father, a smooth-talking salesman, moved his family to Seattle in pursuit of work. The family rented an apartment in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood in 1955, and Stanley Ann Dunham attended Eckstein Middle School, according to school records.

The Seattle area, thanks largely to Boeing, was enjoying a postwar boom, and suburbs were growing as fast as the Douglas firs could be cut. The Dunhams moved to Mercer Island in 1956 to get their daughter into the newly opened high school there.

They rented unit 219 of the Shorewood Apartments, a huge new complex for middle-class families. Dunham's father worked at the downtown Seattle furniture store Standard-Grunbaum, and his wife commuted to Bellevue to work as an escrow officer, according to phone directories of the time.

As a suburb, Mercer Island was still in its infancy. The 1950 census counted about 5,000 people, almost all white. Sanctioned deer hunts had stopped just a few years before the Dunhams arrived.

Stanley Ann Dunham's classmates, many of whom had lived on the island their whole lives, viewed Dunham as a novelty.

"She had a really ironic sense of humor, sort of downbeat and she was a great observer," said Iona Stenhouse, of Seattle, a former classmate. "There was an arched eyebrow, or a smile on her face about the immaturity of us all. I felt at times that Stanley thought we were a bit of a provincial group."

The diversions for Dunham and her class were solidly 1950s vintage: sock hops and sleepovers and the song "Rockin' Robin." Dunham's father drove her and friends to boys basketball games, and would embarrass his daughter with his noisy cheering.

Dunham gravitated toward an intellectual clique. According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the "very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents."

"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: The press is dumbed down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who later taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.

"She was not a standard-issue girl. You don't start out life as a girl with a name like Stanley without some sense you are not ordinary."

One respite was found in a wing of Mercer Island High called "anarchy alley." Jim Wichterman taught a wide-open philosophy course that included Karl Marx. Next door, Val Foubert taught a rigorous dose of literature, including Margaret Mead's writings on homosexuality.

Those classes prompted what Wichterman, now 80 and retired in Ellensburg, called "mothers' marches" of parents outraged at the curriculum.

Dunham thrived in the environment, Wichterman said.

"As much as a high school student can, she'd question anything: What's so good about democracy? What's so good about capitalism? What's wrong with communism? What's good about communism?" Wichterman said. "She had what I call an inquiring mind."

She also showed her politics, wearing a campaign button for Adlai Stevenson.

Despite flirting with atheism, she went to services at East Shore Unitarian church, a left-leaning congregation in Bellevue.

'Black and white didn't go together at that time'

As graduation neared for the class of 1960, Dunham had hoped to join many of her classmates at the University of Washington, and also was accepted to the University of Chicago, according to Obama's memoir, the best-selling "Dreams from My Father."

However, her father was restless. He found sales work in Hawaii, then newly a state. He insisted his daughter, who wouldn't turn 18 until November, attend the University of Hawaii, Soetoro-Ng said.

Dunham hadn't had a boyfriend in high school, according to Maxine Box, her best friend at the time. So Box and others were stunned when Dunham wrote them to say she'd married the University of Hawaii's first African student, a Kenyan named Barack Obama. She gave birth to Barack Hussein Obama Jr. in August 1961.

"We could see Stanley, with her good grades and intelligence, going to college, but not marrying and having a baby right away," said Box, a retired teacher in Bellevue.

"I can't think of anything she said or did that would lead to such a radical thing. At that time, you practically crossed the street if you saw a black man and a white woman. Black and white didn't go together at that time."

Susan Blake, another high-school classmate, said that during a brief visit in 1961, Dunham was excited about her husband's plans to return to Kenya.

"We all had June Cleaver as our role models, and she was blazing new trails for herself," said Blake, a former Mercer Island city councilwoman.

The marriage was brief. By 1962, Dunham had returned to Seattle as a single mother, enrolling in the University of Washington for spring quarter and living in an apartment on Capitol Hill. However, friends said she got overwhelmed and returned to her family in Hawaii, and formally divorced Obama Sr. in 1964.

Over the next three decades, she became a well-traveled anthropologist, working in Indonesia, Pakistan and elsewhere.

"The life that Stanley chose to live after she left [Mercer Island] is indicative of the fact that Stanley thought about what else was out there," said former classmate Stenhouse. "She was ready for having different experiences."

And I can't find whether Stanley received a degree or not. And how does a single mom become a well-traveled anthropologist, working in Indonesia, Pakistan and *elsewhere.* And where exactly is *eleswhere*

CIA mind-control locations. Very top secret. Obama is one of their products. How in the world a man who is half white and was raised by loving white grandparents ends up hating whites is beyond me. If the CIA wasn't involved in this then Obama must be the anti-Christ.

That's simple. Run into some nasty insults and then dive into the ethnic community to avoid it or get an explanation of it. Or, go seeking heritage and wind up going "Wow!" and throw away half of your heritage to embrace the other half fully.

Mixed-race people often have a rough time of it. They're never really accepted by either group and most often have to choose "one or the other" and work for acceptance there.

Mixed-race couples have a tough time of it as well. On the street, the "non-white" folks tend to get really pissed off that their men/women are being "stolen" and can get quite violent about it.

You see this quite often with Hapas, meaning half-white/half-Asian people where they go off and eat the nasty bits of the ethnic culture's food, convince themselves its the neatest thing on the planet, and then become a racist toward their other half. The Asian community laughs and keeps them around for a good chuckle and refers to them as being seriously confused as the Hapa tries to be "more Asian than the Asians"

So, go read Obama's books with this in mind and you'll understand a bit more about him. There is a lot of confusion in the man and it will never go away.

How do you know all this stuff? Do you have friends? Relatives? You read about it?

Personal experience. I have friends and I lived in Silicon Valley for a decade and experienced it first-hand. If you want to experience it yourself, go down there, get yourself a Chinese girlfriend, and walk around for a few years.

I know a lot of mixed-race people. Either part-black or part-Asian or part-American Indian. Listen to them and talk to them. There are also a lot of websites out there for mixed-race people. Go read them. They say exactly the same thing.

I also know a lot of ethnic people. Take East Indians for example. They are seriously into blood purity. A "half-white/half-Indian" person is looked down upon by the East Indian communities.

Or, check out Native American communities. Full-bloods are accorded great status whereas mixed-blood people are looked down upon.

This is very interesting because I dated... I lost count how many Chinese, Japanese and Filipina girls - I worked for several years in Singapore and in Hong Kong so... what's a lonely and handsome boy to do? I never heard of your acronym but I'm not a West Coast guy so maybe they only use it there.

Eventually, I married a Chinese/Japanese girl. We've been married for 13 years and we are as happy today as we were on day one. We have 3 kids and the 2 boys are doing great in school. The girl is only 4 but she's already a ballerina and she's learning to play the piano. We live in Pennsylvania, in a county that's about 99% White and the kids are acolytes at the local Lutheran Church. They are also at the top of their class at school and we usually get dozens of their friends when we do pool parties in the summer and they have to decide which invitations to accept almost every weekend as they are invited to more than one event more often than not. The junior, he's 11 now, is so popular, I saw girls actually fighting to seat next to him when they go to the movies. I am not a very social person myself but I would say that 90% of our friends are not Asian because they're quite rare around here. She will be spending 2 weeks in Italy this fall at the relatives of one of her non-Asian girlfriends (an Italian, of course), because her girlfriend begged her to accompany her and she has next summer booked already for the Russian Riviera (a Russian girlfriend of hers). And, no, I do NOT eat a lot of rice.

I agree with you on one count. Based on my own sad experience, Indian girls are not so easy. I tried dating one while in Singapore but she made me come to her apartment (I thought I was going to get lucky) and she gave me curry. Then she told me that her brother lived in the apartment next door and that he used to get in unannounced, especially if he smelled good cooking. Then, she would protect everything from second base down and she invited me to their next religious function at the temple so that I could get to know everyone so I gave up.

Hapa is short for "Hapa-Houle" which is a Hawaiian term that a lot of West-Coast mixed-race people have adopted for themselves. It literally means "Half Devil".

The difference between what you have and what California is like is the lack of concentration of ethnic communities.

Whitey, in America, has been beaten into being accepting. When you have a large concentration of ethnics in a ghetto regardless of their origin (African, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, East Indian, American Indian, whatever) then you get problems when one of them brings home someone not of their ilk.

A Filipina/Vietnamese couple I know of in California really hacked off their relatives by declaring their kids would speak English and no village dialects, no Asian languages, no nothing. The kids could do what they wanted when they came of age and that was how it was going to be. This caused the relatives to explode.

But that's California and, like I said, the big difference between California and where you are is in the concentrations of people. Its also in where the focus of beating people into submission has gone. Nobody tells the Chinese they're being a pack of racist bastards when they go nuts over a mixed-race couple.

That needs to stop. Everyone needs to play by the same rules and the racists of all colors need to be tagged by the "Diversity Industry" as being such, especially as North America becomes more diverse and more segregated.

Hmmm... nearly all the Chinese girls that I knew were dating White guys. I believe it had something to do with... noooo... it couldn't be that. But, all the Chinese girls that I knew were either in college or college graduate. It's possible that living in Chinatown is different.

Large concentrations of humans can be conducive to conflicts and it's probably true that conflicts are more likely when the crowds are 'diverse'. In our case... I only have 2 neighbors within shouting distance and I would have to shout pretty loud for them to hear me so we have no conflicts.

Its because they don't want to deal with Culturally Chinese Men requiring them to walk to the respectful 5 feet behind them and such. However, Asian ladies are very adept at detecting "Yellow Fever" and kick those guys to the curb quickly.

Dating a white guy is starting to become common with the East Indian women as well and the East Indian men are going bonkers as a result -- at least down in California. Though, lately, its been 'in vogue' for a white girl to find a "Traditional Asian Male" who orders her around. I don't understand that. Backlash against feminism?

But that is how it is down in California. The only thing the rest of us can do is observe it and snicker.

But all of this is part of why when I saw the "Honest discussion about race" BS come up, I labeled it as BS. Race is something people in America talk about constantly. What we need to do is shut up about it and let the bigots of all colors simply be tagged as such.

I guarantee you'll find very few "white Americans" in there outside of a few folks out in the sticks but a whole lot of urban ethnics being blasted. Of course, we'd have to actually have equality rather than the Animal Farm we have now for that to happen.