As school ended, Barry wrote another flirtatious message in Kelli Furushima’s 1978 yearbook. Tom Topolinski wistfully recalled that Kelli was so popular “there was a line for her” and that Barry “wasn’t very forward” with girls. But to Kelli there had been no change in Barry’s demeanor. “He was very funny. He was really warm, friendly,” she recalled. “He just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time.”
Over the summer, Barry worked at a newly opened Baskin-Robbins at 1618 South King Street, less than two blocks from his grandparents’ apartment. Owners Clyde and Teri Higa remember him clearly as “a very good-natured young man, quick with a smile.” He worked alongside Punahou classmate Kent Torrey, whose dad had just taught Obama’s junior-year U.S. history course; rising junior Annette Yee worked there as well. Clyde Higa said Barry was “the tallest employee we ever had” and thus “seemed to have great difficulty bending over and reaching into the ice cream cabinets to scoop the ice cream.” Obama also remembered it was “tough work” behind the counter, and he did not like the mandatory uniform and the accompanying paper cap. He did have an easier time than tiny Annette Yee, who never forgot falling “head first into the near tub” and how Barry “hauled me out.” Teri Higa remembered seeing Barry “gazing out the front store window at times” as if “wishing he was at the beach instead of working.” One customer who recognized Barry behind the counter was Frank Marshall Davis’s dear friend Dawna Weatherly-Williams. “He was a wonderful kid” and even behind the counter, he always “had this beautiful grin on his face.”
By the beginning of Barry’s senior year, Punahou’s tuition and fees stood at $2,050. For a senior, one semester of economics was required; Barry and Mark “Hebs” Hebing both had it with instructor Stuart Gross. But Barry also enrolled in Punahou’s most demanding senior year elective, Law and Society, which was taught by Honolulu attorney Ian Mattoch at 7:15 A.M., three mornings a week. Punahou’s catalog said the course would “enable students to conceptualize the legal framework of his society, to analyze the terms of the social contract between the individual and the society. Emphasis on the study of the various rights afforded the individual in the Bill of Rights and Constitution and consideration of the bases and characteristics of the executive, judicial, and legislative processes.” Mattoch, a member of Punahou’s class of 1961, had graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1965 and Northwestern University’s law school in 1968. He had begun offering the course in 1970, and as its syllabus readily revealed, the content was “about a sophomore in college level because Punahou students are eminently capable of doing work at that level,” Mattoch explained years later. A 1976 article in Punahou’s student newspaper had noted that there were also “optional ‘law labs’ held on Saturday mornings at Mr. Mattoch’s law office” in addition to field trips to courtroom trials. Mattoch said his goal was for students “to understand that law is a product of men and institutions.”
Punahou alumni who went on to successful careers in the law testified that Mattoch’s class had been directly helpful to them during law school. Mattoch began by asking “What is law?” with readings ranging from Roscoe Pound to Sigmund Freud. Then he moved to “the organizational basis of the legal system,” with students expected to master the first hundred-plus pages of a text by a well-known University of Wisconsin law professor. A midterm exam might have as many as seven questions; optional “extra reading reports” on books such as Benjamin Cardozo’s The Nature of the Judicial Process could earn students additional credit. “How a bill becomes a law” and “basic techniques of legal research” were followed by a study of notable Supreme Court constitutional decisions ranging from Griswold v. Connecticut’s 1965 recognition of a right to privacy to criminal procedure rulings. Students then submitted reports comparing the Warren Court of the 1960s to the Burger Court of the 1970s. The final exam lasted ninety minutes and featured more than two dozen questions.
Mattoch remembered Obama as “relatively shy and nonassertive” in class, but he showed up early each morning and did first-rate work. His Punahou transcript indicates an A- in Law and Society, perhaps the single best grade he earned during his high school years. Barry also took a creative writing class that included poetry that fall of his senior year, and in mid-December, the student newspaper published a poem he had written entitled “The Old Man”:
I saw an old, forgotten man
On an old, forgotten road
Staggering and numb under the glare of the
Spotlight. His eyes, so dull and grey,
Slide from right, to left, to right
Looking for his life, misplaced in a
Shallow, muddy gutter long ago
I am found instead.
Seeking a hiding place, the night seals us together.
A transient spark lights his face, and in my honor,
He pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,
And walks a straight line along the crooked world.
While it is hard to imagine seventeen-year-old Barry being inspired to take up poetry by the example of grandfather Stan, his regular visits to see Frank Marshall Davis, a well-published poet of considerable repute, and by 1978 a man of seventy-two, are a more plausible inspiration, even if Davis’s personal history would prevent his role from ever being fully acknowledged.33
In December 1978, Barry finally played his way onto the twelve-man roster of Punahou’s top AA varsity basketball team. The coach was thirty-two-year-old Chris McLachlin, a 1964 Punahou graduate with a master’s degree from Stanford who was a devout student of the highly structured style of play that had been successfully pioneered by UNC Chapel Hill’s Dean Smith and especially UCLA’s John Wooden, with whom McLachlin had personally conferred several years earlier. McLachlin’s 1975 team had won the Hawaii state championship in his first year as head coach, and Punahou’s student newspaper commended the “high quality, hustle-oriented basketball which has become a McLachlin and Punahou trademark.” The 1979 team featured seven returning seniors, including starting guards Larry Tavares and Darryl Gabriel and forward Boy Eldredge (Pal’s nephew), plus star junior forward John Kamana and six-foot-five-inch sophomore Dan Hale at center. Tom Topolinski was often the first man off the bench. The four new members also included Barry’s best friend Greg Orme and junior guard Alan Lum.
Mike Ramos had left for college on the mainland, but his younger brother Greg was an AA team manager. Mike’s departure led to both Greg and his best friend Keith Peterson spending more time with Barry, and Greg immediately saw that just because Barry was taking a class like Ian Mattoch’s, it did not mean the Choom Gang had gone on hiatus or lost its connection to Gay Ray. “When Mike went to college, the first thing Barack did was take me up to the mountains to try to get me stoned, because Mike protected me,” Greg confessed years later. But from December through mid-March, basketball dominated their lives on a daily basis.
A Punahou student newspaper profile of “Coach Mac” said that McLachlin possessed a “great ability to get along with students” and quoted him as explaining that “my obligation is not only to teach the skills and strategy, but also to build character and to develop a sense of team and individual pride.” Practices were six days a week, two hours each time, but, unlike the A team’s, they took place in the late afternoon rather than at dawn. Games ran just thirty-two minutes: four eight-minute quarters. The veteran players understood and respected McLachlin. He was “a very tough coach who knew a lot about the game and made sure that we knew about it as well,” Topo explained. McLachlin told the student newspaper: “I’d like to think of myself as a teacher first and a coach second. A ball team is like class after school. I try to teach things like punctuality, industriousness and honesty,” as well as relaxation techniques, “since relaxation is very important in situations when the pressure’s