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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 telling 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.”
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.
Obama later wrote that Keith possessed “a warmth and brash humor” that led to “an easy friendship,” but around Punahou, opinions on Kakugawa varied widely. Tony Peterson thought “his social skills weren’t the best,” and Pal Eldredge felt “he had a chip on his shoulder.” Keith’s longtime friend David Craven later commented that “Barry was the nice guy he hung around with,” but Keith’s best friend at Punahou, Marc Haine, remembered him as “a popular athlete, a popular figure.”
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.”
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 ball whenever and wherever possible, including evenings and weekends, sometimes going up against adult men and occasionally heading up to UH’s Manoa campus to play there. Outside of basketball season, Punahou’s mandatory after-school phys ed class was another venue for practicing “hack league” skills. Classmates and teachers all unanimously agreed that basketball was Barry’s real passion during all of his high school years, but that December Obama was relegated to the number-two, A-level varsity squad rather than making the cut for the top AA team. Greg Orme and Mark Bendix were also on the A team, but second-class status meant their practices were held every morning from 6:30 A.M. to 8:00 a.m. Once games got under way, the A ballers stumbled to an unmemorable record of seven wins and ten losses. A story in the student newspaper Ka Punahou asserted that the players were “having a good time” nonetheless. Coach Jim Iams insisted the season was “successful,” but decades later, Iams had no recollection of Obama being on his team.
By the fall of his junior year, Barry was a more memorable member of another Punahou assemblage, known as the Choom Gang. It’s not clear when Obama first started to smoke cigarettes, but his friend Mark Hebing can picture Barry coming out of his grandparents’ apartment building on their way to go bodysurfing at Sandy Beach, east of Honolulu, carrying only a towel and a carton of cigarettes. Stan Dunham smoked three packs a day—“always Philip Morris,” his brother Ralph recalled—and Madelyn smoked even more. But the Choom Gang didn’t choom tobacco, they choomed pakalolo, the Hawaiian word for marijuana.
Barry’s friend Mark Bendix was seen as “the ringleader” of the group. Tom “Topo” Topolinski, who was half-Polish, half-Chinese, explained that “everything centered around him. He always had the idea first, or he had a stronger opinion, or he wanted to do something rowdier. That was Bendix.” The other core members—Russ Cunningham, Joe Hansen, Kenji Salz, Mark “Hebs” Hebing, Greg Orme, Mike Ramos, and eventually Wayne Weightman and Rob Rask—enjoyed drinking beer, playing basketball, bodysurfing when the waves were up, and getting high whenever they had enough money. When they did, Bendix, Topo, and/or Barry would head over to Puck’s Alley on the east side of University Avenue where Ray Boyer, their go-to drug dealer, worked at Mama Mia’s pizzeria.
Boyer was haole, but just as visibly, he was gay. “Let’s just say if he was closeted, he wasn’t fooling anybody,” Hebs said later. The Choom Gang called him “Gay Ray.” He was twenty-nine years old, and he lived in an abandoned bus inside a deserted warehouse in Kakaako, a then-desolate neighborhood west of Waikiki. Topo remembered that the scene there “was very scary…. No one in their right mind would live there.” Ray also had another main interest: porn. “I think he was looking to convert some people,” Topo said years later. “He would bring them back to his bus and stone ’em, with porn movies on—they were heterosexual porn movies, but it was still really creepy.” But Ray always had good-quality pakalolo on hand, so the connection was important. “Ray freaked me out. I was afraid of the guy,” Topolinski said. “But he did befriend us, and he was our connection … there were times where he would take us to a drive-in movie…. He partied with us, but there was something about him that never made me feel comfortable.”
“We were potheads. We loved our beer,” Topo said, but the Choom Gang was not entirely about getting drunk or high. “We loved basketball so much that we couldn’t get enough of it,” and that was especially true of Barry. “For us, it was just all fun and games and basketball and hanging out, listening to music and going to the beach,” Topo emphasized. Bendix’s mother taught at Punahou, and they would quietly borrow her car on days when they had a break in their Academy schedules or when they simply decided to cut class. “We could have been easily terminated for what we did,” Topo said. “We did it all the time” since the lure of the beach oftentimes was too great. For most Choom Gangers, parental supervision was lax at best; when Topo’s parents discovered sand in his shorts one weekday and angrily confronted him about how their tuition payments were being wasted, his lesson was obvious: “I just learned to rinse my shorts out better.”
Even for Topo, who had two parents at home, “the Choom Gang became more of a family to me than my own family.” For Barry, whose grandmother left for the bank each weekday morning at 6:30 and whose grandfather often was trying to sell life insurance in the evenings, his buddies and especially their devotion to basketball became the centerpiece of his daily life. His friend Bobby Titcomb, a year younger and not a Choom Ganger but whom one upperclassman called “a bit of a badass,” has vivid memories of “Obama dribbling his ball, running down the sidewalk on Punahou Street to his apartment, passing the ball between his legs…. He was into it.” Topo saw the exact same thing, with Barry “dribbling his basketball to class every day. He was married to that thing.”
Mike Ramos’s younger brother Greg, who was a year behind Barry, and Greg’s best friend Keith Peterson shared the gang’s love of basketball and thought Obama was a visibly much happier teenager than most of his friends, including Mike, Greg Orme, Mark Bendix, and Joe Hansen. Keith was Tony Peterson’s younger brother, and by 1977–78 Keith and Barry were the only two black males in the Academy’s sixteen-hundred-plus student body. To Keith, Mike Ramos was “brooding, unpleasant … just mean.” From both Mike and Orme, Greg Ramos and Keith “got the full big brother to little brother treatment.” Orme was usually just “a jerk. Greg would challenge us to basketball games just for the pleasure of beating us to death.”
Barry and Mike “were very close,” but Obama took part in none of the taunting the younger boys suffered from the older ones. Instead Barry manifested “a level of kindness and genuine caring” which “was pretty unusual, in particular with that group.” Hebs’s entire family felt the same way about how Obama treated Hebs’s younger brother Brad. Both Keith and Greg Ramos also felt that Topo and Bobby Titcomb were each “a great guy,” but they thought Obama “was always a happy guy.” Indeed, as Keith Peterson puts it, Barry “stands out in my mind as being the happiest of that group.”
The Choom Gang had several regular off-campus hangouts—no one dared to choom at school. Each year’s catalog emphasized that Punahou “will not condone” drugs or alcohol and expressly prohibited even tobacco smoking “on or in the vicinity of” campus. Everyone understood that they would get expelled from school if they were caught. “We always gravitated to areas that were secluded,” Topo explained, and one of their favorite spots was a glade named the Makiki Pumping Station, near the Round Top Drive loop road that circles Mount Tantalus, just a bit northwest of Punahou. “It was a very tucked away, beautiful place,” Topo recalled. “It was kind of like our safe haven.”
One evening the group headed up there in Mark Bendix’s Volkswagen van and Russ Cunningham’s Toyota. “We pulled over at the beginning of the hill and we puffed away,” Topo remembered. Then Mark and Russ decided their two vehicles should race. Barry and Kenji Salz were with Cunningham, Topo and Joe Hansen with Bendix. “ ‘On your mark, get set, go,’ so we took off, and we pulled ahead, and we made a turn, and then nothing happened. We’re up there, and we parked, rolled another fatty, and another one,” Topolinski said. “We’re not that much faster than them. Where the hell did they go?” So “we stayed up there for about twenty minutes and then we decided to go back down just to see what’s going on, and we’re about halfway down, and we see Barry running up the road, halfway in hysterics. ‘What the hell’s going on? Barry, where is everybody?’ ” Obama’s answer was startling: “ ‘Kooks rolled the car.’ ‘What do you mean he rolled the car?’ ‘It’s upside down in the middle of the road.’ ‘What?’ And he’s laughing. ‘Okay, well we need to go down there.’ So Barry got in the van, and we drove to the accident site and sure enough his little Toyota was on its roof in the middle of the road.”
Cunningham had a bloody nose, but Kenji, like Barry, was fine. “We didn’t want to get in any more trouble so the rest of us left Russell there by himself,” Topo recalled, “and we piled in the van to go buy more beer.” After downing some, they decided, “Let’s go back up and see what’s up.” At the accident scene, “there’s fire trucks, flares,” even an ambulance. “We wanted no part of that,” so Bendix made a quick U-turn, and the Choom Gang headed for home.
Given the Choom Gang’s intake of both beer and pakololo, it was fortunate that nothing worse than a bloody nose and a totaled Toyota resulted from their many outings. In the middle of the 1977–78 school year, Ann Dunham and Maya returned to Honolulu, once again living at Alice Dewey’s home, so that Ann could take her doctoral candidacy exams in May. Lolo had been stricken with a serious liver disease, and Ann had taken the lead in forcing Union Oil to send him to Los Angeles for treatment before he then joined Ann and Maya at Dewey’s home to recuperate. It is unclear how much Ann saw of her son those months while he continued to live in his grandparents’ tiny apartment. Alice Dewey remembers Barry coming by one Sunday to take his mother, sister, and stepfather out for lunch. In late May, the three of them left to return to Indonesia, but no one recalls any intense bitterness like what Keith Kakugawa had witnessed when Ann left a year earlier.
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.
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 on, like at the free throw line.”
As Topo put it, Punahou’s 1979 team was “just loaded with talent,” and while McLachlin acknowledged that Punahou’s reserves “could have started for any other team in the state,” he also “did not have an everybody plays approach,” Dan Hale remembered. Like so many others, McLachlin had seen Barry dribbling his basketball and shooting baskets whenever possible, and he respected Obama’s “real love and passion for the game.” Ironically, though, Obama’s many hours of pickup game experience on local courts worked against him with McLachlin. As Alan Lum described it, Barry was “a very creative player,” but “his game didn’t really fit our system…. We ran a structured offense. We were very disciplined.” Obama would later assert, “I had an overtly black game,” but that misstated the core of basketball’s deep appeal to him, which he expressed far better when he compared his favorite sport to his favorite music, jazz. “There’s an aspect of improvisation within a discipline that I find very, very powerful.”
Team play got under way with an invitational tournament victory on Maui followed by five straight regular-season wins on Oahu before a one-point loss to University High School. Two victories preceded a defeat by rival Iolani School, then two more wins were followed by a second one-point loss to University High.
Throughout that schedule of games, Barry Obama got little playing time; some days only seven of McLachlin’s twelve players saw game action. At one point during those weeks, Obama, along with Alan Lum and Darin Maurer, made an appointment with McLachlin to request that they receive more playing time. McLachlin remembers the meeting as “nonconfrontational and respectful.” Barry “basically represented the group” and “spoke for them…. It was ‘Coach, what can we do to garner more playing time?’ ” Years later, though, Obama recounted a far angrier scene. “I got into a fight with the guy, and he benched me for three or four games. Just wouldn’t play me. And I was furious.” Lum had been surprised at how direct Barry was with Coach Mac, and McLachlin acknowledged that Barry was clearly “disgruntled.” But Obama was convinced the coach was treating him unfairly. “The truth was, on the playground, I could beat a lot of the guys who were starters,” he later claimed. To team manager Greg Ramos, that was just a “total rationalization…. My perception at the time was that people were where they should have been, and Barack always thought he should have played more than he did.” Even with that tension, Barry’s teammates all remember his usual sunny self. “Very happy, very outgoing,” “a very, very pleasant person to be around,” and “always” with “that smile on his face.”
Punahou was in second place in the AA standings prior to an early March league playoff in which the team defeated University High by one point in overtime before a crowd of more than twenty-two hundred. The student newspaper reported that Obama “gave the team a lift as a second half sub, scoring six points on offense and hustling on defense,” but the box score in the Honolulu Advertiser had Barry missing three free throws. That win gave Punahou top seed in the upcoming three-round Hawaii state tournament. A blowout 77–29 win in their first game included three points by Obama; he played briefly in the second and did not score, but the game still ended in victory for Punahou. The ultimate championship game, against Moanalua on Saturday evening, March 10, 1979, was preceded by a midday team meal at Dan Hale’s home. McLachlin’s wife Beth made “super burgers” that supposedly aided players’ ability to jump.
At Blaisdell Arena in downtown Honolulu, an astonishing crowd of more than sixty-four hundred awaited the contest. “The players majestically strode into the arena as their little admirers flocked around them as if they were blue-clad gods,” Punahou’s student newspaper claimed in its next issue. “They willingly signed autographs and received handshakes from parents and well-wishers,” including of course Stan Dunham. Punahou jumped out to an early lead of 18–4, then ran the score to 32–7. As Alan Lum remembered, “the game was over in the first half” and Coach Mac began substituting liberally. Barry Obama sank one field goal, missed his sole free throw, and finished with two points, but was ecstatic at the 60–28 victory.
“These are the best bunch of guys. We made so many sacrifices to get here,” he told Punahou’s student reporter. McLachlin was equally happy, telling the Advertiser that “we played as near-perfect a game as ever,” including how “the subs came in and played as great a team defense as the regulars.” Within the world of Punahou, winning the state AA championship was just “huge,” as Topo remembered. On the bus ride back to the school, Coach Mac told his team that they had just played “as good a game as I’ve ever seen a high school basketball team play. You played a perfect game, and that included everyone who stepped on that court. This is the finest effort by twelve young men that I have ever seen.”
To Barry Obama, the team’s championship was such an enormous achievement he wrote a tribute to their season for Punahou’s 1979 yearbook, a brief essay that somehow remained utterly undiscovered even a decade after dozens of journalists had traipsed their ways through all manner of various real and imagined details of Obama’s early life. Titled “Winner,” the piece is in no way remarkable, but it most certainly captures how central that team experience was for seventeen-year-old Barry:
A lot of words are thrown around in basketball: unity, character, determination, and sportsmanship. Well, this is a team that lived up to these clichés, both on and off the court. When the season started, we all felt the electricity of something special; through sacrifice, trust, hard work, and a lot of help from coaches and managers, a group of diverse individuals joined together to truly become a team. At times we’ve had problems playing together, but we’ve never had any difficulty getting along; I have never seen a closer bunch of guys. Each player carried his weight and supported the others when they were down; if Gabe wasn’t hot, then John would do it; if Danny’s dunks didn’t beat you, E’s defense would. Some people think that it’s the win/loss record that is important; others think that it’s how you play the game that is important; no matter how you think of it, though, this team was a winner in every sense of the word.
Obama’s memory of his role in the team’s season would grow rosy with age. “My senior year, when we won the state championship, there were a couple games where I think I was a difference maker.” He said his grandfather would recount how impressive a broadcaster had made Barry’s one successful jump shot in that final game sound, but he also acknowledged how those four months had taught him “a lot about discipline, about handling disappointment, being team oriented, and realizing not everything is about you.”
The overall picture Obama would usually paint of his final year at Punahou bore no resemblance to that long-undiscovered essay in his senior yearbook or to the A- he earned in Ian Mattoch’s exceptionally demanding early-morning Law and Society class. “I’m playing basketball, I’m getting high, and I’m not taking my work seriously at all,” he recalled on one occasion. “We’d have basketball practice get over about six, maybe six-thirty, and we’d go get a six-pack … and go out to the park and just screw around…. Then you’d be waking up in the morning and you hadn’t done the reading.” In some tellings, Obama admitted to taking his schoolwork more seriously his senior year—“Man, I should try to go to college, so let me focus a bit more”—but then his senior year was the only one with afternoon basketball practice every day. In another version, he has his mother, ostensibly back in Honolulu early in his senior year, upbraiding him about his grades and his disinterest in applying to colleges, calling him a loafer and voicing her disappointment in him. Presented with that account, one interviewer responded that it made Barry sound like a hood, a hoodlum, to which Obama responded, “That’s basically it. In fact I think my mother referred to me as such at one point.” On another occasion, Obama went even further, claiming, “I think I was a thug for a big part of my growing up.”
The notion that anyone at Punahou or among his friends and other acquaintances ever thought of Barry Obama as a “thug” or hoodlum could not be further from the way he is remembered. Scores of them did see him as “a pretty good jock,” as Obama also called himself; tiny Annette Yee from their summer at Baskin-Robbins thought of him as “a basketball jock”; their mutual friend and ice cream coworker Kent Torrey likewise recalled Barry as “one of the biggest jocks on campus.” But his intense love of basketball, as his yearbook tribute vividly captured, carried no negativity, and anyone who experienced teenage bullying from one or more of Barry’s closest friends without exception recalls Obama as never manifesting any bad attitudes.
By the onset of Barry’s senior year, Greg Orme was unquestionably his closest friend. Many days after basketball practice, they did not “get a six-pack … and go out to the park and just screw around,” but instead walked down to 1617 South Beretania. “It was Tut and Gramps in this small apartment and us two six-footers,” Orme recalled. “We’d raid the refrigerator and then go to his room. He’d put on his earphones. He liked to listen to Stevie Wonder and jazz, like Grover Washington. So he’d have the earphones on and read his books.” Tom Topo came over “once or twice a month.” He remembered that visitors could barely “set foot in his room—he lived off the floor—everything was on the floor…. He always had a Stevie Wonder record on the phonograph,” like Songs in the Key of Life, and sometimes “like a week-old pizza under his bed … he was a messy person.”
But the Choom Gang was no less active than the year before. Indeed, come January 1979, Punahou’s student newspaper, in a humorous survey of different student “species,” profiled one it called “Cravius Cannabis.” Recognizable from “their bloodshot eyes … Cannabi migrate in vans to ‘country,’ where they indulge in enlightening tribal rituals. They have developed specialized language to deal with their common interests: agriculture and commerce.” Years later, on the one occasion when anyone was able to ask Madelyn Dunham about Barry’s high school drug use, she admitted, “I had a few hints, and I think I talked to him a little about it. But it didn’t seem overwhelming or prolonged.” Obama would later make light of chooming, readily admitting, “I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes I smoked” all through those years.
Once Obama seemingly copped to something more than just pakalolo during his Punahou years, referencing “maybe a little blow when you could afford it” while relating how a food service worker supposedly had offered Barry “smack” (heroin) as well. The Choomers’ relationship with Gay Ray went well beyond just “commerce,” and some of them spent significant social time with him, as Topo readily acknowledged. “The guy was a maniac on the road. He tailgated everybody. I was afraid for my life every time I rode with him.” Yet cocaine had zero presence among the Choom Gang, and multiple friends firmly say they never set eyes on it up through 1979. But at least one Choomer knew for sure that “Barry started to experiment with cocaine.” While Topo recalled that “the police were really, really, really relaxed” regarding pakololo, that was not the case with harder drugs, and in Obama’s own later telling, his mother asks him about his friend “Pablo,” who “was just arrested for drug possession” involving cocaine.
By Barry’s senior year his second-closest friend, after Orme, was Bobby Titcomb, who was one year behind before leaving Punahou without graduating. Titcomb came from a distinguished local family. An ancestor had “married into Hawaiian royalty,” according to the Honolulu Advertiser, and his father was a longtime local judge who had won two Bronze Stars during World War II and lost a congressional race against future U.S. senator Daniel Inouye. Perhaps most notably, the elder Titcomb also frequently appeared on the locally filmed CBS television show Hawaii Five-0, which had begun airing nationally in 1968. Bobby Titcomb had first met Barry back in the fifth grade, and the two young men would hike Rocky Hill, just above Punahou’s campus, before extending their reach to Peacock Flats, on the west side of Oahu. Obama’s private, extremely close friendship with Bobby would remain a constant in his life for many years after 1978–79.
In his most starkly dramatized account of his supposedly angry and antisocial high school years, Obama wrote about “the intimation of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boy’s lip or raced down a highway with gin clouding my head.” Not one of Barry’s friends and acquaintances can recall any angry exchanges, never mind any busted lips, and no one remembers him having a taste for gin. In that same passage, Obama also recounted “the swagger that carried me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath, just daring them to say something.”
Paula Miyashiro, Punahou’s 1979 class dean since their freshman year, never knew Barry to have any disciplinary issues and remembers “his infectious, genuine smile” and his “happy,” indeed “jovial,” demeanor. She met with him at least annually to discuss his upcoming year’s classes, and then more frequently as college applications approached. “I remember talking to him about the particular schools he was interested in.” But above all, Miyashiro—now Paula Kurashige—stresses that the one person who saw the most of Barry during high school at Punahou was his homeroom teacher, Eric Kusunoki: “for four years, he saw Barry every single day.”
Even during his junior year’s early-morning basketball practices, or his fall senior year’s three-times-a-cycle early-bird Law and Society classes, Barry was in Kusunoki’s homeroom every morning. Kusunoki was no innocent. “To say there was a lot of drugs going on back then is a fair statement, maybe an understatement,” he frankly acknowledges. But “it wasn’t like guys were smoking dope on campus and coming to school high,” he added. “If they did, it would have been pretty obvious.” Barry without fail would greet “Mr. Kus” with “Good morning,” always “very positive, very pleasant,” and sporting a “big smile.” Barry was “very personable, very respectful,” a “bright presence in the classroom,” and “never got in trouble.” Classmates all continued to have an identical view. To senior-year homeroom colleague Bart Burford, “Barry was one of the more buoyant personalities on campus”; to longtime friend Kelli Furushima, Barry still “just seemed happy all the time. Smiling all the time.”
Decades later, as scores of journalists plumbed the question of Obama’s racial consciousness during his high school years, no more than two would take the trouble to even telephone, never mind visit, the only other black male student in the Academy during both of Obama’s last two years, his friend Keith Peterson. And not a single one would even call the lone black female student, Kim Jones—like Keith, one year behind Barry—who was in the Academy those two years.
Keith Peterson puts it simply. “There was no blackness at Punahou,” only three black students among more than sixteen hundred total there. Across the full range of Barry’s friends and acquaintances, Keith’s perception wins unanimous concurrence. To Bobby Titcomb, Obama “was just another color in the rainbow.” Mark Hebing explains, “We didn’t think about his blackness.” Mike Ramos’s younger sister Connie, who was in the class of ’79, recalls, “I never once thought of Barry as ‘black.’ ” Barry’s friend John Kolivas, who was half Korean and half Greek, says “we didn’t think of each other in terms of race.”
To Keith Peterson, Barry’s “parental piece was a total and complete mystery,” and one Barry never spoke of. “I knew nothing about his father” and “I can’t say that I knew he had a mother at all.” Barry “lived with this older white couple” and “both of his parents so to speak were white.” Indeed “I thought that he was actually adopted by a white family,” that this “older couple had adopted him.” And, in reality, Keith’s impression was not at all wrong. As Madelyn’s younger brother Charles put it, Barack Obama “was raised in a white family.” Bobby Titcomb knew that Stan and Madelyn were Barry’s grandparents, but he understood that actually they were more than that. “You call them grandparents, but they were his parents growing up.”
Yet no one speaks more powerfully, more movingly, about what it was like to be black at Punahou in the late 1970s than Kim Jones Nelson. “It is different being black growing up in Hawaii” than anywhere on the U.S. mainland, she explains. Even more significantly, “It’s an enormous privilege to be a black person in America and grow up in Hawaii. There is no other place in the entire U.S. that provides you with that experience where the color of your skin, the darker your skin is, is not a bad thing.” Just as Frank Marshall Davis had realized thirty years earlier, “the whole race dynamic is turned on its head in Hawaii,” for “in 1970s Honolulu,” as one veteran Asian American journalist would recount, “white people were routinely the target of discrimination,” not African Americans.
Kim Jones had arrived at Punahou in 1976 for ninth grade, and it was “such a multicultural world” that “I never thought about” being the only black female among sixteen hundred students. Hawaii has “just a different worldview,” and “Punahou’s a reflection of the island culture, which is an extremely inclusive culture” of so many countless mixed ethnicities that “I would have had no idea what somebody was.” Across four years at Punahou, Kim had no experience of discrimination. “Not ever. Never, ever, ever. Certainly nothing associated with race.” What instead stood out was “the quality of the teaching” and the richness of the curriculum: the Novel and Film, art history, creative writing. “I loved Punahou.” She barely knew Barry. “He was part of that jock group,” and “I can’t recall any personal interactions with him.”
On at least one occasion twenty years later, Obama acknowledged “the carefree childhood I experienced in Hawaii” and “how truly lucky I was to have been raised” there. He would give thanks as well for “the wonderful education I received at Punahou” and how “Punahou gave me a great foundation,” especially in terms of “values and ethics,” whose “long-term impact on the trajectory of my life” he would appreciate only a decade later. As a prominent African American, Chicago-based theologian who worshiped in the same church later emphasized, above all else, including color, complexion, and race, first and foremost Barack “Obama is Hawaiian.”
