By Jonathan Martin
Stanley Ann Dunham loved this area but moved to attend college in Hawaii, marrying Obama's father.
For four years on Mercer Island, (click here) Stanley Ann Dunham impressed her high-school classmates with a wickedly sharp wit. She was an “intellectual rebel” with a fledgling beatnik sensibility that would eventually take her around the globe.
But shortly after high-school graduation in 1960 she vanished from the Seattle area, and would have been little more than a foggy memory to most — if not for a son she had just a year later: Barack Obama.
Now that Obama’s unique personal history has become part of his rising political profile, his mother’s formative years in the Pacific Northwest are a little-noticed chapter. Even Obama glosses over the chapter in a single line in his best-selling biography.
Dunham, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, is described as the “most dominant figure” in Obama’s life. Obama’s half-sister says Dunham remembered her teen years on Mercer Island so fondly that she wanted to attend college in Seattle. Instead, her parents took her after high school to Hawaii, where Obama was born.
“Her life showed a deep respect for intellectual rigor and perhaps an uncommon sense of learning,” said Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who lives in Hawaii....
