During his time in Honolulu Obama exhibited an increasing appetite for alcohol. Drinking and talking were two of Obama’s favorite pastimes, but there was also a third. As one female student later told Sally Jacobs, Obama “was always ready to engage you as a woman beyond the normal conversation, you know, to take it one step further. Today you’d call it ‘coming on.’ ” Another woman agreed. “He was flirtatious,” but “he was too close in my personal space. … I thought he was a little bit almost aggressive in his way of meeting and being around women.” Among Obama’s Luo friends in Kenya, “he-man-ship” was “no big deal,” and one of his closest acquaintances later boasted that Luo men of their generation had a “habit of waylaying foreign women and literally pulling them into bed.”
When fall 1960 classes began on September 26, Obama’s seven courses included Russian 101. A fellow student was a virginal seventeen-year-old freshman with an incongruous first name who still lived at home with her parents. By early November 1960, however, Stanley Ann Dunham was pregnant.4
Stanley Ann Dunham was born on November 29, 1942, at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, Kansas. She received her forename not from her identically named father but from her mother. Seventeen-year-old Madelyn Payne had secretly married twenty-two-year-old Stanley Armour Dunham a month before her own high school graduation in June 1940. Stanley’s mother, Ruth Armour Dunham, had named her second son after the explorer Henry M. Stanley, her eldest son Ralph would later explain, and the Dunhams didn’t see Stanley as “a man’s name or a girl’s name, it was a family name.”
Ruth Dunham had committed suicide by swallowing strychnine in 1925, at age twenty-six, after learning that her husband was busy womanizing. Her sons, ages seven and eight, grew up living with their maternal grandparents in the small town of El Dorado, Kansas, and would only “very rarely” ever see their father again.
Teenaged Madelyn Dunham was also a devoted fan of the actress Bette Davis, who six months earlier, in a popular feature film titled In This Our Life, had played a southern belle character named Stanley Timberlake. Asked decades later why she had named her daughter Stanley, all Madelyn would say is “Oh, I don’t know why I did that.”
Madelyn’s family had been far from pleased about her marriage to Stanley Dunham, who had failed one year of high school and whose older brother Ralph described him as “a Dennis the Menace type” given to naughty high jinks. One of Madelyn’s younger brothers later said, “I think she was looking at Stanley as a way of getting out of Dodge,” and the newlyweds soon set out on a road trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. By 1941 they were back in Kansas, with Stanley apparently working in an auto parts store before enlisting in the army a few months after Pearl Harbor. With her husband away and a new baby to care for, Madelyn moved in with her parents and commuted to a night shift job at a new Boeing B-29 bomber plant in Wichita. Stanley had become a sergeant by the time his unit entered France some weeks after D-Day, but in April 1945 he was reassigned back to Britain before being discharged that August, following Germany’s defeat and Japan’s announced surrender.5
Just a few weeks later, Stanley, his wife, and his daughter all arrived in Berkeley, where he began taking classes at the University of California. But academic work was not Dunham’s forte. His older brother Ralph, who was working on a Ph.D. at Berkeley, remembered that Stan could not cope with the foreign language requirement. Madelyn’s younger brother Charles heard from his sister that Stanley was more interested in reading murder mysteries than doing his course work, and he expected Madelyn to write his term papers for him. “What can you do when your wife won’t support you in getting an education?” Stan later told Charles.
Madelyn was unhappy with their situation, and in mid-1947, Stanley, Madelyn, and four-year-old Ann drove eastward with Ralph Dunham. Following a July 4 stopover at Yellowstone National Park, Ralph dropped the young family off in Kansas, inscribing a copy of C. S. Forester’s Poo-Poo and the Dragons for his niece: “To Stanley Ann Dunham / As a going away present from her Uncle Ralph / Summer of 1947.” More than sixty-five years later that volume and Ann’s other childhood books would lie well preserved in a box in Honolulu.
Stanley enrolled in several classes at Wichita State University, but within months, he had taken a sales job at the Jay Paris Furniture Store in Ponca City, Oklahoma, two hours south of Wichita. One colleague later remembered Stan as a successful, first-rate salesman, knowledgeable about both furniture and his customers. He was also remembered as “a smart guy who liked to tell you how smart he was.” In Ponca City, Madelyn initially stayed home before realizing that she had to have a job. “The evening cocktail hour gets earlier every day. If I don’t work, I’ll turn into an alcoholic.”
Ann began first grade at Ponca City’s Jefferson Elementary School in September 1948, and in 1950, she transferred to another for third grade after the family moved to a different home. Then, in the spring of 1951, Stanley moved the family more than 250 miles southwest, to Vernon, Texas, when he took a new furniture store job, and Ann completed third grade there, as well as all of fourth, fifth, and sixth, before the peripatetic family again moved, this time back to El Dorado, Kansas. Stanley worked first at a Farm & Home store, then got a better job at Hellum’s Furniture in Wichita, while Ann attended seventh grade in El Dorado.6
During the summer of 1955, the Dunhams moved yet again, this time all the way westward to Seattle, where Stanley had a job at the huge Standard-Grunbaum Furniture store. They moved into an apartment northeast of the University of Washington’s campus, and Ann walked to nearby Eckstein Middle School for eighth grade. The next summer they moved to Mercer Island in Lake Washington, southeast of downtown Seattle, and Ann began ninth grade at the brand-new Mercer Island High School. They rented a nice apartment in Shorewood, and sometime in 1957 Stan changed jobs once more, working at Doces Majestic Furniture.
Throughout high school, Ann went by her given name of Stanley, or Stannie. She made a good number of friends and was taught by some outspokenly progressive teachers. One friend later recalled that Stanley showed little interest in clothes or boys; instead, she and her friends would take a long bus ride to the lively “UDub” campus neighborhood, an unusual expedition for Mercer Island teenagers. At home, tensions about money sometimes brought on loud arguments between Stan and Madelyn, who had found a job as an escrow officer at a bank in nearby Bellevue. Stanley also had a strained relationship with her father, and one high school friend said she “hated her father at the time that I knew her.”
Sometime during her senior year, she and a male classmate set off on a nonromantic road trip that took them as far south as Berkeley, California, before anguished parents and law enforcement officials located them there. Stan Dunham flew down and drove them back to Seattle. Also during her senior year, Stannie saw a much-heralded foreign film, Black Orpheus, which was French director Marcel Camus’s adaptation of the famous Greek legend, set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She would still recall the movie a quarter century later, and she may have been especially struck by the film’s male lead, black Brazilian actor Breno Mello.
Toward the end of Stannie’s senior year, Stan heard about a job opportunity that was even farther west than Seattle—in Honolulu. Albert “Bob” Pratt, who operated Isle Wide furniture distributors, was adding a retail outlet, and he hired Stan Dunham to run it. The rental home where Pratt’s family lived, at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, had a backyard cottage, and Stan relocated there sometime before Stannie’s high school graduation. On the day after commencement in June 1960, she and her mother flew to Honolulu.
Stannie had not wanted to move to Hawaii, especially given her great attraction to UDub in Seattle, but she was still five months shy of her eighteenth birthday. So, in September 1960, she enrolled as a freshman at the University of Hawaii, taking a philosophy course and perhaps others in addition to Russian 101.7
How Stanley Ann Dunham’s relationship with Barack Obama commenced and developed remains deeply shrouded in long-unasked and now-unanswerable questions. A quarter century after she became pregnant, her son, temporarily back in Honolulu, would write to his girlfriend that “one block from where I sit, the apartment house where I was conceived still stands.”