To Kakugawa, fifteen-year-old Barry was “very, very quiet” and “very, very shy … I wouldn’t say introverted, but he was just a very shy, cautious kid.” Keith took a great liking to Stan Dunham. “Gramps was so great to all of us,” he recounted years later. “He was everyone’s grandfather.”
Tenth grade was also the first time Barry played on an actual basketball team. Punahou’s junior varsity one was coached by 1961 Punahou graduate Norbie Mendez and played five preseason and fourteen regular season games between December 1976 and February 1977. Barry’s friends Mark Bendix, Greg Orme, Tom Topolinski, Joe Hansen, and Mark Heflin were also on the team. Obama never cracked the starting lineup, but he ended up as the third leading scorer as the team won nine of its fourteen official games.
Yearbook photos that year show Barry with a bushy Afro and sometimes more than a little extra weight. A classroom picture captures a decidedly chubby Obama, whereas the ones for JV basketball and concert choir, perhaps taken later, show a visibly more mature fifteen-year-old. Sometime midyear Barry also spent significant time reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Keith Kakugawa remembers Obama pointing out the book in Punahou’s library, and Mark Hebing recalls Barry recommending it to him. Barry would later acknowledge absorbing the book that year, saying that Malcolm’s “repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me … forged through sheer force of will.”
One Saturday evening sometime in the late spring of 1977, Kakugawa, Mike Ramos, a junior athlete on Punahou’s varsity basketball team, Obama, and fellow sophomore Greg Orme headed to a party at Schofield Barracks, a large U.S. Army base almost twenty-five miles northwest of Punahou. Most of Oahu’s African Americans were from military families, and the people at this party were predominantly black men and women several years older than the teenage Punahou quartet. Barry didn’t yet drink, but the group stopped to buy a case of Heineken on the way. Once there, the Punahou youngsters were not welcomed with open arms by everyone present.
“The place was packed” and “it was dark,” Ramos remembered. He was more than a year older than Obama, and he was from a Filipino family of modest means; he had first met Barry a year earlier at a party where they discovered they were both fans of jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. Orme was white, and he had known Obama since their seventh-grade year. Barry had passed along his interest in jazz to several friends that year. But at the Schofield party “everyone else, except the four of us, was dressed for a night at Studio 54, and we were dressed for a luau at the beach,” Kakugawa later said.
Especially if they were haoles, Punahou students were looked upon “as the snobs, the rich kids” in many circles on Oahu. “Everyone on the island treated you differently once they knew you were from Punahou,” Keith said. Ramos remembers that Kakugawa, who was known to some of the people at the party, took offense whenever a verbal putdown of Punahou was uttered, and Ramos also remembered Keith “doing a bunch of trash talking” that night in response. Kakugawa admitted “we got in an argument because we were from Punahou,” and the four of them were headed for the door in less than an hour.
Ramos was confused. “I was having a pretty good time”—“Why are we leaving?” For Orme, it was the first time he had been one of the few white people in a mostly black setting, and during the car ride back, he mentioned that to Barry. “One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school,” Orme later recalled. Ramos agreed. “For the haole guys in our group, it was a kind of eye-opening experience for them.” But for whatever reason, Obama was upset by Orme’s comment—“he clearly didn’t appreciate that,” Greg remembered. Kakugawa thought Barry was bothered that one or more girls at the party had refused to dance with him, but Barry had been the youngest person there. Years later, he would describe the evening as a racial coming-of-age moment for him, but Ramos and especially Orme, who would become Obama’s closest friend during their two remaining years at Punahou, never heard or saw anything of the sort. Barry “would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. But we never talked race.”
In late April or early May 1977, not long after the party, Ann and Maya returned to Indonesia so that Ann could resume her dissertation fieldwork. Keith Kakugawa starkly remembers the day they departed. Ann told her son she was headed “home,” and “Barry was disgusted” after Ann and Maya were dropped off at the airport. “You know what, man? I’m really tired of this,’ ” Obama complained. Kakugawa told his friend that Ann was just doing her job, but Barry almost spat out his response: “Well, then, let her stay there and do it.” Keith’s buddy Jack McAdoo said he remembers that day too and recalls that “there was a lot of pain there” for Obama. Kakugawa knew that Barry “was going through a tough time” that spring and was experiencing a lot of “inner turmoil,” but “it wasn’t a race thing … Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is bullshit.” The crux of what his friend was wrestling with was “the hurt he felt about being abandoned by his mother” on top of his long-absent father.
In later years, Obama would almost always suppress his past feelings about his by-then-deceased mother, but occasionally a highly revealing comment could slip out. “When I was a kid, I don’t remember having, I think, one birthday party the whole time I was growing up,” and he admitted, “I spent a childhood adrift.” But most of Barry’s classmates that spring were not aware of what Orme, Ramos, and especially Kakugawa could sense. “I was probably the only one who didn’t always see him smiling,” Keith recounted. To Kelli Furushima, an attractive Asian classmate whom Obama sought out at the once-per-class-cycle chapel sessions, Barry seemed “a happy guy, comfortable in his skin.” She enjoyed his “casually flirting” with her; “he was very friendly, very warm and had a great sense of humor.” When the school year was ending and everyone was signing each other’s 1977 yearbooks, Obama’s note on Kelli’s copy likewise reflected no angst: “Our relationship is still young so I am looking forward to picking it up where it left off next year. Your [sic] a small but dynamic person. Have a beautiful summer and see you next year. Love, Barry.”31
Obama would not turn sixteen years old until August 4, 1977, so getting a summer job was a challenge, though years later he would say he had worked bagging groceries. But that birthday brought with it a driver’s license, and he began driving Stan’s reddish-brown Ford Granada, a car he would look back on with no fondness. One day that summer Keith Kakugawa and Marc Haine took Barry out paddling—Hawaiian for canoeing—and after they were back on dry land, beer was at hand. “I distinctly remember cajoling Barry into getting drunk with us.” He said, “I don’t drink,” but Keith corrected him: “You’re gonna drink.” Kakugawa boasted, “I was the one responsible for making Barry take his first drink, but Marc Haine was the one that handed it to him.”
When Barry’s junior year began, a full-year course in American history was mandatory. Barry had the regular class, not the advanced placement version, taught by his classmate Kent Torrey’s father Bob, who knew Barry pretty well but remembers him as “a totally average” student. Another full year of English was required, but in addition to American Literature, the students chose from Punahou’s almost collegelike breadth of electives. With the standardized college-entry SAT exam scheduled for November, the fall kicked off with eight weeks or so of Saturday-morning preparation classes; instructor Bill Messer recalled Obama as “affable and pleasant” but “oddly quiet in class.” Barry later claimed that “art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school,” but he also took drama. He and four classmates produced a short film they titled The Narc Squad, a parody of The Mod Squad. Linne Nickelsen, who had “long, straight blond hair and a closet full of miniskirts,” played the Peggy Lipton character, and Barry imitated the African American actor Clarence Williams III. Plenty of surfing footage was included, and Barry added a dashiki to his bushy Afro. Nickelsen later took credit for luring “Barry out of his dashiki for the pool party scene…. I must admit to being disappointed at not having received even passing credit for instigating that disrobing.” No screenings of the film have been reported for decades.
Basketball season began in December. Barry and his closest buddies had been playing