Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible.

Who was Obama's mother? The shorthand version of the story has a woman from Kansas marrying a man from Kenya, but while Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Wichita in the fall of 1942, it is a stretch to call her a Jayhawk. After leaving Kansas when she was a youngster, she and her parents lived in Berkeley, Calif., for two years, Ponca City, Okla., for two years, and Wichita Falls, Tex., for three years before they ventured to the Seattle area.

They arrived in time for her to enter ninth grade at the new high school on Mercer Island, a hilly slab of land in Lake Washington that was popping with tract developments during the Western boom of the postwar 1950s. The island is not much more isolated than Staten Island on the other side of the country. Just east of Seattle, it is connected to the city by what was then called the floating bridge.

The population explosion, along with a nomadic propensity, brought the Dunhams to Mercer Island. Stan was in the furniture trade, a salesman always looking for the next best deal, and the middle-class suburbs of Seattle offered fertile territory: All the new houses going up would need new living room and dining room sets. He took a job in a furniture store in Seattle.

Madelyn, who brought home a paycheck most of her life, found a job in a banking real estate escrow office, and the family settled into a two-bedroom place in a quiet corner of the Shorewood Apartments, nestled near the lakeshore in view of the Cascade Mountains. Many islanders lived there temporarily as they waited for new houses to be finished nearby. But the Dunhams never looked for another home, and they filled their high-ceilinged apartment with the Danish modern furniture of that era.

Stanley Ann was an only child, and in those days she dealt head-on with her uncommon first name. No sense trying to hide it, even though she hated it. "My name is Stanley," she would say. "My father wanted a boy, and that's that." Her mother softened it, calling her Stanny or Stanny Ann, but at school she was Stanley, straight up. "She owned the name," recalled Susan Botkin, one of her first pals on Mercer Island. "Only once or twice was she teased. She had a sharp tongue, a deep wit, and she could kill. We all called her Stanley."

In a high school culture of brawn and beauty, Stanley was one of the brains. Often struggling with her weight, and wearing braces her junior year, she had the normal teenage anxieties, according to her friends, though she seemed less concerned with superficial appearances than many of her peers were. Her protective armor included a prolific vocabulary, free from the trite and cliched; a quick take on people and events; and biting sarcasm.

John W. Hunt said those traits allowed Stanley to become accepted by the predominantly male intellectual crowd, even though she had a soft voice. "She wasn't a shouter, but sat and thought awhile before she put forth her ideas. She was one of the most intelligent girls in our class, but unusual in that she thought things through more than anyone else," Hunt said.

Stanley would use her wit not to bully people, her classmates recalled, but rather to slice up prejudice or pomposity. Her signature expression of disdain was an exaggerated rolling of her big brown eyes.

Susan Botkin thought back to late afternoons when she and Stanley would go downtown to the Seattle library and then hitch a ride home with Stan and Madelyn. "We would climb into the car, and immediately he would start into his routine," she recalled. In the back seat, the daughter would be rolling her eyes, while in the front, Madelyn -- "a porcelain-doll kind of woman, with pale, wonderful skin, red hair, carefully coiffed, and lacquered nails" -- would try to temper her husband with occasional interjections of "Now, Stan . . ."

Another high school friend, Maxine Box, remembered that they enjoyed getting rides in the old man's white convertible and that he was always ready and willing to drive them anywhere, wanting to be the life of the party. "Stanley would gladly take the transportation from him," Box said, but would "just as soon that he go away. They had locked horns a lot of times." The mother, she sensed, was "a buffer between Stan and Stanley."

Stanley and her friends would escape across the bridge into Seattle, where they hung out at a small espresso cafe near the University of Washington. Anything, Hunt said, to "get away from the suburban view. We would go to this cafe and talk and talk and talk" -- about world events, French cinema, the meaning of life, the existence of God.

Their curiosity was encouraged by the teachers at Mercer Island High, especially Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who taught advanced humanities courses open to the top 25 students. The assigned reading included not only Plato and Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also late-1950s critiques of societal conventions, such as "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte, "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman and "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, as well as the political theories of Hegel and Mill and Marx. "The Communist Manifesto" was also on the reading list, and it drew protests from some parents, prompting what Wichterman later called "Mothers Marches" on the school -- a phrase that conjures up a larger backlash than really occurred but conveys some of the tension of the times. "They would come up in ones and twos and threes and berate the teacher or complain to the principal," Hunt recalled.