This article originally appeared in the May 23, 2013 edition of TIME magazine underneath the title, Obamas Grand Old Party. To subscribe to TIME, click here. Maurer, who mostly played guard, said he and Obama were no slouches but they were on teams with some really strong jocks. The motorcade arrived in Kapolei around 11:30 a.m. ___ Mr. Obama and the others often would visit family members there at Christmas and on occasion the men would meet, but it was not until 2004 that they agreed to gather annually. Hawaiian Vacation Reveals Importance of Family, Friends to Obama I guarantee he would have won a third term if he could have run again. Standing up for your buddies. There was his mother, Ann, a brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams. On his senior yearbook page, he left behind these words: We go play hoop.. They marked the 10th year of their rendezvous by looking through old photos, Mr. Ramos said, of when the kids were young and the dads had dark hair. And of course, he said, they all the president included reflected on the past year. From left: Greg Orme, Kelli Allman, Barack Obama and Megan Hughes at Allmans parents house in Honolulu. Then there's the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. Among U.S. presidents, Obama is not alone in carving out time regularly to reconnect with his roots. Allman said that she thought highly of Obama, who was 'very intelligent and witty'. All Rights Reserved. He would have started on any other high school team on the state," McLachlin said of Obama. The Latest: Vacationing Obama dines at Hawaii restaurant You have reached your limit of 4 free articles. We could all be hotheads at times, but he was very diplomatic, he said. Or Japanese. But Obama never gave up and his work ethic was second to none on this team. HONOLULU -- Until recently, the players on Hawaiis 1979 state basketball championship team thought their glory days were behind them, consigned to yearbooks and faded newspaper clippings. We have this tradition to head home to Hawaii for Christmas. You gotta give him that.. Allman also gaveTIME a snapshot of Obamas yearbook entry to her. We had to prove ourselves, focus on playing good ball. So just get the f--- outta my face." In the spring of 1979, Obama's mother and Maya, Barack's younger half sister by almost nine years, flew to Hawaii for his high school graduation. Although their paths have long since diverged, they've made it a point to gather for frequent reunions, in one of Obama's most visible links to the days when his life was much simpler and his problems more mundane. Bendix added that he was not shocked when Obama was elected president. Obama wrote in the lengthy yearbook note. He said Obama may have come across as easy going, but he was no pushover. "You need to find Greg Orme," instructed Obama's old basketball coach, Chris McLachin. Bendix said he and Obama stayed in touch and he was at his 2008 inauguration. "I went to those parties up at Schofield but never saw him at any of them." The other kids would scrap with him sometimes, but because Obama was bigger and better-fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat. Her date was Greg Orme, Obama's best friend. There are, however, chapters in Obamas high school narrative that are not subject to dispute. "He would protect the smaller ones." He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta. Obama and his mother joined her new husband, a kind man who later would become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer, family members in Indonesia say. John F. Kennedy had his band of brothers from wartime. They divorced after seven years of marriage and have a daughter. Arkansas is filled with people still burned from their interactions with the national news media, which descended on the state during Bill Clintons 1992 campaign and stayed for his presidency, continuing to poke and prod at his business and personal dealings. It was very important to me all the way through my teenage years.. I remember when we were seniors in high school, somebody said Barry would be on the Supreme Court, he said. 21:01 GMT 31 Dec 2014. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been who knows what it was?" Mr. Ramos was a year ahead of Mr. Obamas Punahou class of 79, but played with him on the basketball team. "In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. The Secret Service stopped a man who briefly flew a drone near the president's motorcade Monday as the president and his friends were returning from golf at the Mid-Pacific Country Club. The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. And from the first day of 5th grade right up until his graduation in 1979, the young man was one of only a small number of black students at a school heavily populated by the children of Hawaii's wealthy, most of them white and Asian. I wish I would have known that those things were bothering him, or if they did bother him, said Eric Kusunoki, Obamas homeroom teacher from grades nine through 12. Darin Maurer and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. And having a Hawaiian in the White House made them all proud. Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. Barry spent his days at the Punahou School in Hawaii studying, shooting hoops and goofing off with his friends. Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. It wasnt until 2008, when Obama was making his first run for president, that they saw each other again at a fundraiser. "His friends called him `Negro,' " Darmawan said. TIME Exclusive: President Obamas 1979 Prom Photos. She also shared a complimentary note that Obama had written in her high school yearbook. His character, the way he conducts himself, thats always been his footprint. They're not his wife and daughters, who came with him, but a trio of pals whose friendship dates back to Obama's high school days in Hawaii. By Obama's Final Hawaiian Vacation as President - ABC News But Orme is a hard man to find. President Obama's Prom Date | Inside Edition The three men Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg. Still, the story of his early years highlights how politics and autobiography are similar creatures: Each is shaped to serve a purpose. "He'd go right up to the coach during a game and say, `Coach, we're killing this team. McLachlin said he told Obama he was volunteering for the American Heart Association and the president urged him to keep in touch. Hopefully now that hes done well get to see each other more, he said. ", We would be like, Hey lets go to the beach, Bendix recalled. He took out (Osama) Bin Laden. "He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman," said another friend, Widiyanto Hendro Cahyono, 46. Just as he was the only African-American on the basketball team, he was also the only jock working on the schools literary magazine, Ka Wai Ola. More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review of public records, show the arc of Obama's personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans. If you look at our teams, that year I was the only white guy on the starting five. 14:27 GMT 23 May 2013 So we'd get three kids together to fight him," recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. But Kakugawa, in the interview Saturday, said Obama's recollection of that conversation was mistaken. But it has revealed the vagaries of memory, as well as the ambivalent emotions stirred among old acquaintances when someone they once knew becomes famous. In Hawaii, Media Surfs Obama's Past - POLITICO So far, the candidacy of the man known by his high school friends as Barry Obama has been good for the Hawaii economy and bad for newsroom budgets. I loved his game," he said. Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii during Obama's Punahou days, was more reserved but seemed to love having her grandson's friends over to play and hang out. On Sunday evening, Titcomb hosted a barbecue at his beachfront home for the entire contingent from . Magazines, Digital Not many presidents retained friendships from as far back as high school, although George W. Bush had close friends from his prep school days at Andover. Their photos are more likely to be stored on Facebook than in a shoe box. Obama's highs school pals in Hawaii: Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb, Greg Orme A close friend of Obama's from their teenage years, Greg Orme, spent so much time with Dunham that he, too, called him "Gramps." Obama's motorcade left his Kailua vacation rental home at 10:48 a.m. under partly cloudy skies. Some of that crew has stayed in Hawaii, but others have moved off island. The race to track them down and coax them to open up likely will include reporters as well as opposition research experts for political rivals. HONOLULU (AP) The Latest on President Barack Obama family vacation in Hawaii (all times local): 10 p.m. President Barack Obama and his family dined with friends Wednesday night to cap off another day of their Hawaii getaway. When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, "Curang, curang!" But the foursome rarely goes more than a few months without reconvening in one arrangement or another. The Presidency Can't Stop Obama's "Golf Tradition" - Townhall The Hawaii holidays became more and more appealing, he said in an interview just after he began his run for president. Among his supporters, his likability and credibility have only been boosted by his stories of being an outsider trying to fight his way in. The tenacity and determination Obama showed to make his high school basketball team was an early indicator of the greatness to come. So far, this process has not yielded anything especially damaging to Obamas candidacy. After a recent lunch with a reporter, he winked at a table of faculty-lounge colleagues and joked, This one is with Playgirl.. In an interview with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black man. But Kakugawa, a convicted drug felon, said Saturday that he had never been the "prototypical angry black guy" that Obama portrays. As the president's motorcade left the golf course at 3:58 p.m . Kakugawa explained that he had meant they were playing in the world of the elite people who populated and ran Punahou--famous Hawaiian families like the Doles, owners of the pineapple fortune, or the original developers of Waikiki, the tourist mecca. Left: Kelli Allmans OAHUAN 1979 Yearbook. Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called "Barry O'Bomber" by teammates. But any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that he had a racially diverse group of friends--many of whom often would crowd into his grandparents' apartment, near Punahou, after school let out. Daily Mail Reporter, Images show Obama ahead of his prom night in Honolulu in 1979, The Obamas to return to Martha's Vineyard? ___ 10:40 a.m. Greg Orme Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images In the book, Obama discusses race and racism at his high school with one other Punahou student, "Ray,'' the young black man described in detail in "Dreams" as perpetually angry at the white world around him. A spokeswoman for People said the reporter, West Coast correspondent Maureen Harrington, did not take the list. One of his incredible legacies will be how he modeled being a family man. Obama and his Punahou School classmates Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme enjoyed a sunny and breezy day on the links. The havoc time wreaks on fashion spares no one, not even the president of the United States. From TIME's press release on the. We were all cracking up, and everyone was smiling, says Allman. The havoc time wreaks on fashion spares no one, not even the president of the United States.In a newly unearthed photo published Thursday in TIME magazine, a 17-year-old Barack Obama is seen wearing a white dinner jacket as he poses with friends on the night of their senior prom in Hawaii. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. Barry would be the only black person. Obama is playing golf with three of his friends, Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme. That first year, Mr. Ramos said, I remember coming home from a golf outing and literally starting to cry, so emotional was the contrast he felt between their friendships and the transactional ones he said he had since formed as a businessman. The reality was less tidy. Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in "Dreams." 'When you're president, everybody wants something from you and only these types of friends are able to simply want your well-being. A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine. Were the minorities here.. Barack Obama as a sophomore with the junior varsity basketball team at Punahou School, Honolulu, in 1977. On the lower half of the seventh-grade page is the same group, under a heading of Useless Races in America. The joke, it seems, is on intolerance. I think if people were one-on-one with him, theyd see things his way Look at how hes treated President-elect Trump. He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese. Obama's High School Basketball Coaches, Teammates Remember 'Barry' And he would be going to the gym to work on his strength and conditioning.. It can be very racially hostile, especially if youre white or black. But the reality of Obama's narrative is not that simple. Likewise for Mr. Obama, it seems. "They held his hands and feet and said, `One, two, three,' and threw him in the swamp," recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. "Did you know that in Thomas Jefferson's day, and right up through the 1930s, anybody who had the price of tuition could go to Harvard? For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Its good for me, pre-Alzheimers, to try and remember this stuff, he said, struggling to recall something other than Obamas love for basketball and his improbable hook shot.