Obama's mom: Not just a girl from Kansas
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-0703270151mar27,1,642790,print.story
Strong personalities shaped a future senator
By Tim Jones, Tribune national correspondent. Tribune correspondents
Kirsten Scharnberg and Laurie Goering contributed to this report
March 27, 2007
MERCER ISLAND, Wash. -- Chip Wall can't help but zero in on the little
stuff whenever he watches Barack Obama on TV.
The turn of the smile, the sharp wit, the comfortable self-
assuredness, all of which he saw up close, a half-century ago.
It's his old pal Stanley.
For Wall and a few dozen others, Obama on the campaign trail often
brings to mind Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama's mother and a strong-willed,
unconventional member of the Mercer Island High School graduating
class of 1960.
"She was not a standard-issue girl of her times. ... She wasn't part
of the matched-sweater-set crowd," said Wall, a classmate and retired
philosophy teacher who used to make after-school runs to Seattle with
Dunham to sit and talk -- for hours and hours -- in coffee shops.
"She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read
about and could argue," said Maxine Box, who was Dunham's best friend
in high school. "She was always challenging and arguing and comparing.
She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't."
The education of Obama the would-be politician didn't begin, of
course, until after his birth in 1961, in Honolulu. But the parental
traits that would mold him -- a contrarian worldview, an initial
rejection of organized religion, a questioning nature -- were already
taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous
Dunham family, where the only child was a curious and precocious
daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her
Stanley -- after himself.
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