With his friends, he would drive the Choomwagon, a Volkswagen microbus, to Mount Tantalus, biographer David Maraniss wrote. Mr. Titcomb was golfing with the president within hours of the Obamas Dec. 21 arrival on Oahu. I don't know why Greg would want to spend anytime with me at all! Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian in six months. Obama, he said, was especially adept at knowing how to build relationships. He said it puzzles him that, as president, Obama was often accused of failing to reach out to political opponents. Not as well known is the fact that the many people who raised him were nearly as diverse as the places where he grew up. Sheriff: Cleveland man shot after attacking man with hatchet at Morgan County campground Were the minorities here.. Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama's 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. Titcomb has worked as a commercial fisherman and an airline employee, according to the school's alumni magazine. But Kakugawa, in the interview Saturday, said Obama's recollection of that conversation was mistaken. I would go out there and be the only white person. "He challenged the coaches.. Basketball was the great equalizer, he said. We could all be hotheads at times, but he was very diplomatic, he said. Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy. IE 11 is not supported. 'You really deserve better than clowns like us; you even laugh at my jokes! We are just such a mixed-up bag of races. A high school friend has shared photographs of Obama at his prom night withTIME magazine - as well as a very friendly note he penned in her yearbook, in which he calls her 'sweet and foxy'. The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Bendix said he and Obama learned most of their basketball moves on the playground. Through the haze of the 70s, they recall only the rat baller who was always up for a game. To them, the characteristics Obama displayed on the hardwood as one of the Sons of Oahu were evident in the way he handled the daunting responsibilities as leader of the free world. 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. The Latest: Obamas, friends tour Hawaii Islamic arts center "His friends called him `Negro,' " Darmawan said. 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. Obama has told the story--one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness--time and again, in remarkable detail. Or f------ Eskimo." The White House says Obama teed off Saturday at the nine-hole course at the Sunnylands retreat in Rancho Mirage with childhood friends Bobby Titcomb, Greg Orme and Michael Ramos. The man is staggering and numb but eventually pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,/And walks a straight line along the crooked world.. When a friend gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled, "Curang, curang!" "They were like brothers," says Allman. Most classmates and teachers recall an easygoing, slightly chunky young man, with the same infectious smile he sports today. If Obama did show flashes of anger or hurt, according to friends and teammates, it sprang from his lack of minutes on the basketball court more than his angst as a young black man in a multiracial society. Every time out hed come over and chat with me about my stroke, my health, he said. In one photo he hugs his beaming sister. Bendix added that he was not shocked when Obama was elected president. 'When you're president, everybody wants something from you and only these types of friends are able to simply want your well-being. "We live in a world of bullies and the U.S. has been bullied around. Another story put forth in "Dreams" as one of Obama's pivotal moments of racial awakening checks out essentially as he wrote it. I always knew he would do something, of course we never expected hed be in the White House, teammate and lifelong friend Greg Orme said. On this visit alone, Obama has spent more than 22 hours with the group on the lush golf courses that dot the island of Oahu. 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. Obama wrote in the lengthy yearbook note. The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But generally, said the presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, It does seem like these presidents need to find a sanctuary whether its a place or a group of people where they can just be themselves and feel the connection from the present to the past. High school friends who predate adulthood and professional attainments often know each others siblings, parents, even grandparents and know each other in a way that later friends often cannot. I hadnt seen him for 30 years.. We get together for golf, he said. He made an appointment to see me one day and he brought along a couple other guys who wanted more playing time, Chris McLachlin recalled. With rain drizzling over Oahu, Obama's motorcade whisked Obama across the island to Titcomb's beachside home in Waialua, about an hour outside of Honolulu on the North Shore. You are extremely sweet and foxy, he wrote. The 1979 photo was snapped inside the home of former classmate, Kelli Allman, who was the prom date of the pr, Fashion alert! Then, one day about a year after he had arrived, Obama was gone. He has ethnic Chinese mother and his father was Polish. In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin. So did Maurer, who is now a pastor in Houston. Obamas family is already insulating itself. Dan Hale, the 6-foot-7-inch star center of the 1979 Punahou basketball team, said Obamas depiction of Hawaii as a place where race really mattered hardly resonates with him. "He never verbalized any of that," Orme said during a telephone interview from his home in Oregon. The images from 1979 show a grinning 17-year-old Obama in a white suit with his arm around his date, Megan Hughes, before they headed to the party at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii. In a new introduction to the reissued edition of "Dreams," he noted that the dangers of writing an autobiography included "the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer [and] selective lapses of memory." Obama and his family have been in his native Hawaii since December 20 for the Christmas holiday. 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. But the reality of Obama's narrative is not that simple. 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. The same as in Washington, Orme said. Then and now, Punahou and Hawaii liked to see themselves as more diverse and colorblind than the rest of the nation. WASHINGTON President Obama has called Hawaii his refuge, and so it has been throughout his political life. Basketball was a refuge, a place where I made a lot of my closest friends, and picked up a lot of my sense of competition and fair play, he said. 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. He is unyielding in the things he believes in., I think hes done an unbelievable job as president, he said. With a trimmed Afro, Hawaiian flower leis around his neck, Obama was surrounded by the disparate people who shaped him. All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood--primarily because he was bigger and had black features. For the president to be able to be with a group where he can be absolutely relaxed a group that knows him from his youth on, and who he knows are friends with him not because of what he became, but because of who he is is a really comforting and warm thing, said David Axelrod, Mr. Obamas longtime strategist. One of the neatest things is that he has promoted family, he said. He posed in lifeguard stands. The motorcade arrived in Kapolei around 11:30 a.m. ___ After years during which the friends grew apart, Mr. Obama reconnected with Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme a decade ago. "He lived across the street from school and before classes hed shoot baskets on the outside courts, then at lunch hed shoot more baskets, then Id have him for three hours, then hed go home, eat supper, and then be outside again shooting baskets.. Those of us who were black did feel isolated--there's no question about that." For a reputed loner, Mr. Obama has remained remarkably close to a trio he met as a teenager at Honolulus prestigious Punahou School boys of Hawaiis year-round summer with whom he played basketball, bodysurfed, drank beer and, like so many other young islanders in the 1970s, smoked pot, the choom of that long-ago nickname. But we never talked race." 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.. But I was pretty wrapped up in my own world back then.. "I did say we were playing in their world," he explained, "but that had nothing to do with race. Maybe we could have helped him. Others almost certainly illustrate how carefully the young man guarded the secret of his loneliness from even those who knew him best. He said they adored his slam-dunking style and no-look passing, but their coaches were not fans. 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. Obama, too, was about to journey far from these familiar shores. In August, Obama kicked off his 53rd birthday weekend golfing with the three friends in suburban Maryland before heading to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains. As he listened, McLachlin never dreamed that one day this determined young man, who had spent most of that season warming the bench while the Punahou High School varsity basketball team was marching on to win the Hawaii state championship, would grow up to be Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Orme recalled that years later, at Obama's wedding reception in Chicago, Obama brought the crowd to tears when he spoke of his recently deceased maternal grandfather and how he made a little boy with an absent father feel as though he was never alone. Because hes a pastor, Maurer said he prefers not to weigh-in on politics. 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. ", Ive known Barry since the fifth grade, he said. Life without a father It was a complicated time. Orme would stay for the games. "He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman," said another friend, Widiyanto Hendro Cahyono, 46. He represented them in a very dignified, respectful way. In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background--raised for a time in the Third World, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban politics--makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political system. They have a different level of affection for you than friends you meet later in life. "But looking back now I can see he was seeking more from those guys than that. But Obama did get to play in the game when the school clinched the state title. Or Japanese. She said a woman from People came to visit with her and then walked away with the Punahou reunion list and all its phone numbers.
