A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  Stanley Ann (left), age fourteen, at a slumber party, summer 1957

  “We were growing up in that Leave It to Beaver, June Cleaver kind of society,” Ware told me. “We just weren’t very well prepared.”

  The Dunhams were not, however, the Cleavers. They may have played bridge with the Hansons and the Farners, but they did not match any Mercer Island template. Steve McCord recalled an evening he spent with the Dunhams in the summer of 1959. A good student, he was not an athlete and never felt that he quite fit in. He would have preferred to have grown up on a farm or someplace where, he imagined, people were “looser and less inhibited, less anxious about themselves.” Madelyn and Stanley struck him as more colorful, interesting, liberal-minded. “Closet bohemians, maybe,” he said. That evening, they smoked a lot of cigarettes and talked. “He had a slightly rotten sense of humor that I liked, a dirty mind,” McCord remembered of Stanley Dunham. “They weren’t your run-of-the-mill Ozzie and Harriet by any stretch of the imagination. I remember at one point, the conversation was getting goofy. We talked about a lot of things. I said something about prehensile toes. And Stanley turned it around and said ‘pretensile hose,’ making sort of a phallic reference. It was a silly little dirty joke. And immediately, I think Madelyn pretended to be offended and hissed, ‘Stanley!’” There was some discussion of the possibility that the Dunhams might leave Mercer Island after Stanley Ann’s graduation. Didn’t Madelyn mind dropping everything and starting over? McCord asked her. In an answer that would strike him years later as prescient in light of what became of Madelyn’s daughter, she said, “We Dunhams usually bob to the surface.”

  That was true of Madelyn, certainly. When Stanley had enrolled at UC Berkeley, she had taken a job in the admissions office at the university while Stanley Ann was still a toddler. Back in Kansas, she had worked in a real estate office in Wichita. Mack Gilkeson, who knew her from Augusta, remembered running into her at a restaurant where she was working as a hostess. In Ponca City, even though Stanley was making enough money that Madelyn no longer needed to be employed, she announced to a relative that she was going back to work. “The evening cocktail hour gets earlier every day,” she said. “If I don’t work, I’ll turn into an alcoholic.” She modeled shoes, broadcast community news on the radio, may have worked for a newspaper, and got her first job in banking in Texas, Charles Payne told me. When the family moved to Seattle, she parlayed her banking experience into a job in the escrow department of a savings and loan. She was elegant, slim, and well dressed, and she enjoyed her work. At the same time, she kept close track of Stanley Ann’s grades. She seemed interested in enabling her daughter to go well beyond what she and Stanley had accomplished. Madelyn had inherited their mother’s intelligence, Charles Payne said. Ralph Dunham described her as brilliant. But if she was smarter than Stanley, some said, she was careful not to overplay that advantage in the interest of keeping the peace.

  Stanley had brought the family west so he could take a job selling furniture in a department store in downtown Seattle. But he seemed to be around more than Madelyn. To Stanley Ann’s friends, he was handsome and jolly, yet Maxine Box described him “as you would a used-car salesman—blustery, but what is behind it all?” He would go a little too far to make Stanley Ann’s friends laugh. She was on the receiving end of a disproportionate share of his teasing. He was not averse to issuing orders. “I can’t do that because of my father,” Iona Stenhouse remembered Stanley Ann saying. “I have to be home because of my dad.” From an early age, she ran circles around him. She would trick him, he would become angry, she would play innocent, he would stomp up and down. “If she wanted to do something, he would say no for no reason,” one relative said. “She would say things she knew would irritate him. She was able with a straight face to tease him in a way that he didn’t know he was being teased, and he would get furious.” In high school, when she wanted to go out with a group of friends, she would enlist John Hunt to pretend to be her date and get her out of the house without too much fatherly interrogation. “When I’d get sucked into a conversation with Stan, she’d roll her eyes: ‘Don’t!’” John Hunt told me. He said, “Big Stan wanted to know about her life, her friends. She kept him locked off.” She was like a lot of her friends, Chip Wall said: “We wanted to get out from under the thumb of our parents.” Ralph Dunham was especially fond of his niece, whom he had known well as a small child when they were all living in Richmond, California. Years later, Ralph said, Stanley Ann told him it might have been easier if he had been her father. “He was overprotective,” Ralph said of Stanley. He tried to control where she went, what hours she kept, whom she was with. He added, “Stanley was very strict with her—which is probably why she maybe tried to break out of the mold once she got older.”

  Stanley and Madelyn’s marriage was stormy. He could be opinionated and stubborn, and had what Obama described years later as a violent temper. He did not like losing arguments and was not in the habit of agreeing to disagree. It was not unknown for him and Madelyn to ruin a family holiday by waging a protracted argument over a period of hours in the presence of out-of-town relatives. Ralph Dunham told me his brother dropped out of UC Berkeley because of a language requirement, but others said Madelyn complained that she had ended up writing too many of Stanley’s term papers while he sprawled on the couch, reading murder mysteries. She pulled the plug on Berkeley, it was said, and he did not forgive her for insisting they return to Kansas. “What can you do if your wife won’t support you to get an education?” he complained more than once. In the summer of 1957, Madelyn’s parents, her aunt Ruth, and her younger brother, Jon, stopped in Seattle on their annual summer road trip. Jon, a few years older than Stanley Ann and more like a cousin than an uncle, had left the University of Kansas and was scheduled to report to the Air Force the following February. He found a job selling menswear at a department store in Seattle and spent four months sleeping on the Dunhams’ couch. To him, Madelyn and Stanley’s marriage at that time looked shaky. There was loud arguing, not infrequently about money. Stanley Ann would sometimes bolt from the apartment or shut herself in her room. “I think she maybe just didn’t want to hear it,” Jon Payne told me. Stanley Ann reached the conclusion early on, Kathy Powell Sullivan said, that her parents’ marriage was not a model she intended to follow.

  Mercer Island was politically conservative but not extreme. In the spring of 1955, a year before the Dunhams moved to Mercer Island, John Stenhouse, a member of the school board and the father of Iona Stenhouse, who would become Stanley Ann’s classmate, was subpoenaed to testify before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communist activity in the Seattle area. Born in China and educated in England, he said he had attended a handful of Communist Party discussion-group meetings in Los Angeles in 1943 and in Washington, D.C., in 1946 but had had no contact with the party since. He had moved to Mercer Island in 1949 and joined the school board in 1951. He worked for an insurance company in Seattle and, with his wife, was active in helping to reclaim land on Mercer Island for parks and in working to establish a health cooperative. That spring, school boards in Bremerton and Tacoma were firing teachers who took the Fifth Amendment when called before the subcommittee, and the state legislature made Communist Party membership a crime. On the Stenhouse case, Mercer Island was split. Marilyn Bauer, a close friend of Iona’s, told me that her own father was constantly saying, half teasingly, “We’re not having the communist over, are we?” Iona Stenhouse, however, recalled feeling sheltered and protected by the community—spirited away to the beach club by family friends, for example, when reporters or lawyers were at her parents’ house. In March, two hundred people turned out for a school board meeting to consider Stenhouse’s fate. After a two-hour hearing, the board left the decision to Stenhouse, who decided not to step down. To Jim Wichterman, arriving not long afterward to teach at the high school, the island’s handling of John Stenhouse reflected a fundamental sense of proportion and balance
that Wichterman believed prevailed at that time on Mercer Island.

  The religion to which Stanley Ann was exposed as a teenager was Christian and liberal. Along with the Stenhouses, the Dunhams were among a group of families on Mercer Island that attended East Shore Unitarian Church in Bellevue, known for a while during that period as “the little red church on the hill.” It had been started in the late 1940s in an old kindergarten building on Mercer Island and then in a funeral chapel in Bellevue by several families, including Stanley and Madelyn’s bridge partners, the Farners. Tired of commuting to a Unitarian church in Seattle, the founding families were interested in religious education and the teaching of moral decision-making for children. The founders were “bright, liberal movers and shakers,” as the Farners’ eldest daughter, Judy Ware, described them. Her mother, the director of religious education for the church, encouraged Judy to read John Hersey’s Hiroshima at age twelve. The Reverend Dr. Peter J. Luton, the senior minister when I visited the church in 2009, told me that the original families had emerged from World War II confident in the possibility of building a just, rational, and loving community. They were religious humanists, he said, their faith rooted more in “lived experience” than in supernatural and revealed truth. They had a sense of awe and wonder, an appreciation of what he called nonrational experience—idealism, the mystery of love, the moving power of music—without attributing it to a traditional god. The first minister, Chadbourne A. Spring, delivered sermons with titles like “In Praise of Heretics.” At Christmas, children reenacted the birth of Jesus Christ, Confucius, and the Buddha. The church encouraged community service and tolerance, and pushed for social justice. It took up the fight against redlining and in favor of nuclear disarmament, and King County’s fair-housing legislation emerged from meetings at the church. Its youth groups, in which Stanley Ann took part, attended services at other churches and synagogues, then would “come back and do comparative religion,” said Iona Stenhouse. They would “talk about world religions, good works, what we could do in the world as we got older.” Jane Waddell Morris, who attended the youth groups with Stanley Ann, told me that she herself had become, through the East Shore experience, “a lifelong seeker,” aware of spirituality around her but not committed to an organized religion (just as Stanley Ann would be described, I noticed, many years later as an adult). Jane Morris’s home in Taos, New Mexico, she said, was filled with religious icons—a Northwest Coast warrior, a Hopi kachina, a Guanyin, various retablos and bultos, and an old stone Ganesh.

  Jim Wichterman, who taught Stanley Ann during her senior year, was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Washington when he was hired to teach on Mercer Island. The principal of the high school assigned him to teach “contemporary world problems” to seniors, who were barely ten years younger than he was. Since contemporary world problems were philosophical problems, he figured, why not teach philosophy? He did that for seventeen years, thundering through Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. After Mercer Island, he taught philosophy at a private school in Seattle for another twenty-two years. He never got his Ph.D., but that had ceased to matter. When I met him in the summer of 2008, he was pushing eighty and still teaching philosophy—this time at the Women’s University Club in Seattle and in a night class for adults on Mercer Island. “I had a circus teaching,” he said. “I should have paid them.” The feeling appears to have been mutual. In high school annuals in the late 1950s, Mercer Island students wrote about Wichterman more often than almost any other teacher. In conversations a half-century later, Stanley Ann’s classmates described Wichterman’s class as an intellectual coming of age.

  At seventeen, from the 1960

  Mercer Island High School annual

  His method, modeled on his graduate-school courses, was total immersion. His students read constantly and in enormous quantities. There were research papers every six weeks. In tutorials, students critiqued one another’s work. Knowledge is about questions, Wichterman told them. Is the world absurd? Does God exist? What constitutes good? “What do you think that means, Miss Botkin? Miss Dunham?” Susan Botkin Blake recalled Mr. Wichterman asking. How do these ideas relate to the present? Maxine Box remembered typing until three in the morning. “We were the higher-percentile bunch,” said Steve McCord. “We thought of ourselves as being brighter than most people at most schools. We were aware of our uniqueness, whether it was real or imagined.”

  Down the hall, Val Foubert, their humanities teacher, assigned The Organization Man, The Hidden Persuaders, Atlas Shrugged, and Coming of Age in Samoa. Kathy Powell Sullivan recalled, “We devoured Jack Kerouac. On the Road would have been our bible.” Conformity was disdained; the very idea of difference was alluring. Foubert, a World War II veteran who some said moonlighted as a drummer in a swing band, is said to have eventually defected to another district in a disagreement over Mercer Island’s handling of parents’ complaints about his reading list. Parents complained, too, that Wichterman had no business teaching a college course in high school. The course was making trouble at home. “You know how kids are,” Wichterman told me. “They see an idea they get in class, they set that up at the dinner table with Dear Old Dad. Dad gets up out of his chair, all exercised. Of course, the kids love that. You don’t start out to cause trouble at the dinner table; what you start out to do is get the kid on his tippy toes: ‘If you don’t like this argument, refute it. Give me reasons you don’t like it. You have to think.’”

  It may have been in Art Sullard’s tenth-grade biology class that Stanley Ann fell in with the group of boys who would become her closest friends in her last two years on Mercer Island. Sullard, also young and a musician, would banter with certain students and occasionally make sarcastic asides. Over dissections, students milled around in groups, the humor tending toward black. Stanley Ann’s somewhat sarcastic sensibility surfaced. “My seatmate was an old athlete friend, very intelligent,” John Hunt recalled. “I remember him making comments about Stanley because he was trying to figure out what was with her. She was so different.” The following year, she was assigned to a chemistry table next to one occupied by Hunt, Bill Byers, and Raleigh Roark. They all became friends, fancying themselves as thinkers on the cultural cutting edge. Byers was slightly older than the others, had access to a car, and had glimpsed the wider world—Seattle and Bellevue, anyway. He had friends off the island and, at sixteen, had started dating a girl in Seattle. The son of a liquor-company manager who had abandoned graduate work on Chaucer in order to find paying work during the Depression, Byers was reading Dostoyevsky, listening to Pete Seeger, and borrowing old classical records from the high school librarian. Outside of school, he and a friend would amuse themselves by making gunpowder out of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur and creating small explosions in the woods—not to damage anything, just for fun. In the classroom, he was a contrarian on principle. Byers remembered Raleigh Roark as having “a very original type of intelligence. You could count on him saying or doing something that just went crosswise with the accepted norms.” Roark had a half sister living in bohemian splendor in the university district of Seattle, from whom Roark’s friends got a first glimpse of a counterculture. They discovered foreign films at theaters in Seattle. “Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy was one that hit us the hardest,” Hunt remembered. “It was totally different from anything we’d seen—Third World poverty, a complete cultural gulf. We had no experience, we hadn’t even read about that. We would go and sit and talk and talk. What did it mean? What’s it got to do with us? We were trying to acquaint ourselves at second- and thirdhand, and wondering what to do about it.” There were coffeehouses in the university district where it was possible to spend hours drinking espresso, eating baba au rhum, sitting on pillows, and listening to classical guitar and jazz. “We’d get in Bill’s car, do anything, go for a picnic—anything to get away from the families and to talk,” Hunt said. “We all had a very strong need to ta
lk about things we didn’t talk about at home.” Kerouac’s On the Road conjured dreams of escape, Roark remembered. San Francisco was Mecca.