Barack Obama -- The Dunhams

The Dunhams

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Madelyn Lee Payne

Maternal Grandmother

Stanley Armour Dunham

Maternal Grandfather

The Slaveholding Side Of The Family

As an historical aside, Obama's mother's forebears were slaveholders. One of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.

Stanley Armour Dunham

Stanley Armour Dunham was born March 23, 1918, came from the oil-town of El Dorado, Kansas, the "other side of the railroad tracks." He attended El Dorado High School and worked on oil rigs during the Depression.

Madelyn married Stanley Armour Dunham on May 5, 1940. The newlyweds didn't tell her parents of the marriage until after she had her high school diploma in hand.

Madelyn Lee Payne

Madelyn Lee Payne was born in October 26, 1922, in the tiny Kansas town of Peru. When she was 3, Rolla Payne moved his young family to the nearby boomtown of Augusta, population about 5,000, where she was raised.

Rolla and his wife, Leona, a teacher, lived in a "company house" at the edge town. The one-story frame house had three bedrooms, an indoor bathroom, a front porch that went the full width of the house and another enclosed one out back where Leona Payne did the family laundry.

Behind the house were the racks where the oil company stored its pipe and about 100 feet away was the office where Rolla Payne worked. Next door was the empty lot where the Paynes and other neighborhood kids played baseball.

Madelyn was the oldest of four children. Fifteen years separate her and the baby, Jack.

"She called us ‘the kids,"’ remembers her younger sister Margaret Payne, who shared a bedroom with Madelyn and is known in the family by her middle name, Arlene.

"I would say she more liked to ignore us," says Payne, 82, a retired statistics professor now living in Chapel Hill, N.C. "But that was the age difference, and not that she was mean or anything."

In a family of avid readers, Madelyn was voracious.

In 1939, when Simon & Schuster introduced the U.S. to paperbacks with its Pocket Books series, Madelyn subscribed. She devoured titles like James Hilton’s "Lost Horizon," Emily Bronte’s "Wuthering Heights," "Five Great Tragedies" by Shakespeare and "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie -- which fed a lifelong love of murder mysteries.

The Bible was also a constant in the Payne household. Contrary to the image of Dust Bowl, Depression-era Kansas, the Payne children weren’t force-fed the Scriptures at the dining room table.

"No, that was an individual effort," says brother Charles, 83, the closest in age to her.

An Elopement

They eloped a month later, on the evening of her high school graduation in June, 1940. She was seventeen and a half years old, he was twenty-one. Her parents disapproved of the match.

Stanley enlisted for military service in World War II in June of 1942 and served in Patton's 3rd Army. He saw no combat.

After the war Stanley became a retail furniture salesman. He moved his family to Oklahoma, Texas, California and back to Kansas before they settled in the Seattle area in 1955.

Although a Seattle Times article reports that the family rented an apartment in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle, records also show that the family lived in the Wedgwood Estates apartment complex, in one of four units at 7529 39th Avenue NE, during their first year in Washington state. Stanley Ann Dunham attended 8th grade at Eckstein Middle School in the Wedgwood neighborhood.

He died in Honolulu on Feb. 8th, 1992. He is buried at Punchbowl Cemetery because of his military service. Madelyn died November 2, 2008. Obama spread her ashes onto the sea from the cliffs of Hawaii.

Madelyn attended college at the University of Washington and then went to work on a bomber assembly line during WW II. After the war, she attended UC-Berkeley, worked various jobs on the Mainland. In 1960, when they came to the Islands, she joined the Bank of Hawaii. She also volunteered in probate department of the Oahu Circuit Court House.

While Madelyn could be stern and tough at work, her personality changed around her husband. A friend said he seemed like a real rough-and-tumble guy. When Madelyn was with Stanley, she was very quiet. He was the man of the house.

An Early Photo

Stanley Ann and Stanley Armour

Mercer Island -- The Fifties

The Dunhams went from El Dorado to a bigger opportunity in 1955 -- to a large store in downtown Seattle called Standard-Grunbaum Furniture at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Pine Street. "First in Furniture, Second at Pine," read the Yellow Pages ad in the Seattle telephone directory.

In 1956 the family learned of a new high school opening on Mercer Island, then a considerably more rural community (the city itself would not incorporate until 1960), and moved to the island, renting unit 219 of the Shorewood Apartments at 3206 E Lexington Way. Stanley Dunham worked as a salesman at Standard-Grunbaum Furniture in downtown Seattle initially, though by 1957 he was working at Doces Majestic Furniture in Seattle. Madelyn found work as an escrow officer in Bellevue.

Seattle in the 1950s had no Space Needle, no Microsoft, no Starbucks. Mercer Island, now a pricey home to corporate luminaries such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was then "a rural, idyllic place," said Elaine Johnson, who remembered summers with "sleepovers along the water in sleeping bags. It was so safe." The island was quiet, politically conservative and all white. As a suburb, Mercer Island was still in its infancy. The 1950 census counted about 5,000 people, almost all white. Sanctioned deer hunts had stopped just a few years before the Dunhams arrived.

But consistent with the 1950s, there were undercurrents of turmoil. In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.

Madelyn and Stanley shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.

"In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as 'the little Red church on the hill,'" said Peter Luton, the church's senior minister. Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.

Hawaii

In 1960, Anna's father found a better opportunity at a furniture store in Hawaii and moved his family to Honolulu. The Dunhams originally lived at 2277 Kamehameha Ave., before moving to 2234 University Ave. Beginning that summer (1960), with the family's move to Hawaii, Stanley Ann enters her "beatnik" period.

When Ann Dunham arrived in Hawaii , she was a full fledged radical leftist and practitioner of critical theory. She practiced a little photo modeling too. I won't post the pictures but this website has them.

Mainstream media sources, the recollection of friends and associates and Obama's account are frequently at odds about where Anna was, and what she was doing, at any point in time. No one knows for sure, and there are no records to substantiate, where Stanley Ann Dunham was, or what she was doing, between the summer of 1960, until she showed up in Hawaii with a two week old in August, 1961.

What follows is the best account, cobbled together from multiple sources. There are additional supporting sources at the "More Stuff" button.

The problem with documenting what Anna did, or did not do, is that much of what we think we know about these events comes from Obama's "Dreams...," and that account has been proven to be unreliable -- but it was first.

Typical White People

Obama would describe his grandparents, the people who would raise him, as "white folk" and later, during the campaign would describe his grandmother as a "typical white person."

Madelyn Dunham, who Obama affectionately called "Toot," raised Barry Obama. It was probably her money that got him admitted to the prestigious Punahou School in Hawaii and paid his fees. Her efforts were formative, perhaps even more so than those of Obama's mother Ann, Madelyn's daughter. And yet Madelyn is being hidden away, as Obama said, "somewhere in Hawaii."

Two years before Anna left Barry with her mother, in December 1970, Madelyn was named one of the first two female vice presidents at Bank of Hawaii.

It was a no-nonsense, serious workplace. And Dunham had a reputation as a tough boss who quickly tested young management trainees.

"The first day I met her I was totally scared," Ching said. "She was the Grande Dame of escrow who started the local escrow association. I was just a trainee who didn't know anything about escrow whatsoever. But she gave me a file and said, 'You're a college grad. Here, close this.' You don't know how to swim and she throws you in and you either sink or swim."

And America's media have supinely allowed Obama to pretend he has no white relatives. On may occasions, his Kenyan step-grandmother, Sarah, who never laid eyes on Obama Jr. until 1986, has been put on public display as "his grandmother." His real grandmother, who actually raised him, has been put away in a closet.

The Chicago Tribune reports "the Obama campaign declined to make available."

Is this because she is white and Barry Obama is a "black" candidate for president or is it because she holds a secret.

The "segregation" of Madelyn Dunham, Obama's white grandmother, and only real grandmother, has to be one of the cruelest and most mendacious political kidnappings this nation has ever seen.

On the other hand, Stanley Dunham was in the habit of taking the 11-12-year-old Barry to a bar in the black "red-light district," the hangout of prostitutes and drug pushers, according to Obama's book.

I would see little Barry -- as his grandfather called him -- little Barry and his grandfather mostly all over. They walked everywhere. Stan Dunham, his grandfather, took him everywhere. They met everybody and knew everybody. I mean it's Hawaii, right? It was easy. You wanna be friendly? You wanna see people and know people? You can do it, and he did, and little Barry went with him everywhere.

And yet nobody from back then is coming forward today, except Neal Abercrombie. No doctors, nurses, neighbors, nobody.

Obama Throws His Grandmother Under The Bus Again

What’s the deal with Barack Obama selling out his own grandmother every chance he gets?

In another example of Obama’s lousy attitude towards the woman that raised him since he was 10 years old, the New York Times this weekend recalled an interview in which he criticized his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, for electing to undergo hip replacement surgery despite being terminally ill:

"I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost… (I don’t feel) society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model."

"I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill."

Apparently Mrs. Dunham is exhibit #1 on how the no good elderly are heartlessly wasting the nation’s collective healthcare resources for their own selfish purposes, like wanting to walk.

As a productive member of society, Mrs. Dunham had every right to make her own decisions regarding healthcare, including a new hip if that is what she and her doctors saw fit. It is not our place, or anyone else’s for that matter, to be dictating to seniors at what time they no longer qualify for expensive healthcare procedures.

The audacity for Obama to suggest that his own grandmother wasn’t worth a $20,000 hip replacement surgery at the end of her life is remarkable. Michelle Obama will spend more than that on hair and makeup this year alone!

This latest criticism of Mrs. Dunham is reminiscent of Obama’s highly touted March 2008 race speech where, in addition to his famous declaration, "I can no more disown him (Rev. Wright) than I can disown the black community," Obama described his grandmother as, "a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street and who, on more than one occasion, has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Obama actually called his grandmother a racist in public, to the entire world! Now he points to her as a classic example of the elderly stealing valuable healthcare resources from the nation. Does Obama’s depravity towards Mrs. Dunham know no end?

I don’t know if it’s a race thing, or age thing, or what, but it makes me wonder, if Obama thinks so poorly of own grandmother, I can only imagine how little he feels for the rest of us.

The Invisible Grandmother

Obama's real grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who raised him and put him through the prestigious Punahou School, remains a shadowy figure. Hidden away by Obama's campaign, the woman that Obama described as a "typical white person" is, according to Obama, "somewhere in Hawaii."

Real grandma -- "typical white person"

In August, 2008, after delivering a campaign speech, Obama's first stop on his Hawaii vacation was a visit to his white grandmother's Makiki apartment, where he lived during his youth.

Obama -- escorted by Secret Service and accompanied by a few campaign staff and a pool of reporters and camera crews -- arrived at about 4:10 p.m. yesterday and spent an hour with his 85-year-old maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him. He was not accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and two daughters.

The original "typical white person," probably doesn't have a lot of time left, but Obama didn't think to bring her grandchildren for a visit -- and after almost 2, years spent an hour -- what a loving grandson.

Toot Dies

Honoring his beloved toot. President-elect Barack Obama and family spent the third day of their vacation, remembering the life of Obama's grandmother Madelyn Dunham.

Dying of Cancer, Obama left the campaign trail and rushed to be by her side to be one last time in October. She died at the age of 86 just days before her grandson won the presidency. Obama says his Toot raised, loved, and helped him become the man he is today. Almost two months after Dunham's death, the family pays their final respects.

Just as the wind, emotions run strong at Lanai lookout. President-elect Barack Obama and family arrive around 3:30pm after an earlier private service for "Toot" at a Nuuanu church. (video)

Following the ceremony, Obama drove to the Lanai Lookout. He and about 20 members of his family climbed over a stone wall and down onto rocky ledges to scatter Dunham’s ashes.

She died late the night of the 2nd, the body was removed by 3:30 am Monday morning, the urn of ashes was returned Tuesday morning and an apartment lived in for 40 years was cleaned out by Nov. 6th.

She was cremated and her urn of ashes was returned to her apartment by the morning of Tuesday, November 4th.

The medical examiner wasn’t involved. The staff from the funeral home showed up for her body before 3:30 am Monday and brought the ashes back by Tuesday morning.

Related: Obama received two inheritances from his grandmother, Madelyn. He made less than $1,000 from the sale of a tax-free trust. A second inheritance -- shares in the Bank of Hawaii where his grandmother rose from a secretary to a vice president -- sold for between $250,000 and $500,000.

Madelyn Dunham Burial

FBI Destroyed Stanley Dunham's File

New Zeal is reporting that the FBI destroyed a file on Barack Obama's grandfather, the man who selected Communist Frank Marshall Davis to be the future president's mentor during his growing-up years in Hawaii.

"The FBI confirms that a file was maintained on Obama's grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham," states Cliff Kincaid, the journalist who runs the public policy group, America's Survival, Inc. (ASI). "This is a troubling development in the effort to understand the Marxism that drives Obama's policies as president today."

In correspondence with Kincaid, available at www.usasurvival.org, the FBI says the file was destroyed in 1997. The FBI made the admission after Kincaid complied with a request to verify the identity of Dunham and the fact that he was deceased.
Dubbed "Gramps" by Obama, Dunham has been depicted in news reports as a patriot who served in the U.S. Army in World War II. But he had a close relationship with Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member Frank Marshall Davis in Hawaii, who reportedly drank and smoke pot with Dunham.

Davis was not only a communist but a pornographer who wrote a semi-biographical novel about having sex with a 13-year-old girl. He mentored Obama for as many as nine years of his young life in Hawaii.

Dunham, who was white, had picked Davis as a mentor for Obama because he thought the youngster, whose father had abandoned the family, needed a black role model. Davis, who was black, fit the bill. "It was a terrible decision," Kincaid commented. "He turned over the young Obama to a communist sex pervert for moral guidance."

While the exact nature of the Dunham file will be a topic for speculation, Kincaid said that is likely that some of the information was related to Dunham's relationship with Davis. Kincaid's ASI had previously obtained the 600-page FBI file on Davis and posted it at www.usasurvival.org. It shows that Davis was a key high-level operative in a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii.

Obama had referred to Davis in his memoir as merely "Frank," a poet filled with knowledge and advice. The real identity as that of Frank Marshall Davis was disclosed by a writer for a CPUSA publication, who said it would prove to be historically significant, and then publicized by anti-communist New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon. Kincaid confirmed the identity of "Frank" with a source in Hawaii and then obtained and posted the Davis FBI file.

However, most media, anxious to see Obama elected president, preferred to identify Davis as a "civil rights activist" and ignore his communist affiliations.