Barack Obama with his grandparents Stanley and Madelyn Dunham in New York City, where Obama attended Columbia University. The Senator is canceling nearly all of his campaign events to fly to Hawaii to visit Madelyn Dunham, 86, who is suddenly ill
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Obama never really knew his biological father, who died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982, and his grandfather died in 1992, three years before his mother. But Obama's grandmother has always been there. She took care of Obama when he was 10 and returned to Hawaii to attend school while his mother spent a few years continuing her anthropological research in Indonesia. At the time, his grandparents helped Obama get a scholarship to Punahou, an élite prep school on the island. All three of them lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment on Beretania Street in Honolulu.
Dunham's nickname in the family was Toot, short for Tutu, which means "Grandparent" in Hawaiian. Her role as the family rock predated Obama. She had her first and only child, Obama's mother, when she was 20 and living in Kansas. Her husband had wanted a boy, so they named the girl Stanley, after him. Over the next two decades, Dunham moved at least five times — always in pursuit of her husband's next adventure as a salesman. They went to California, Texas, Washington and finally settled in Hawaii.
Obama's birth does not appear to have been planned. His mother and father met at the University of Hawaii and got married when she was already pregnant. To help provide for the new baby, Obama's grandmother, who did not have a college degree, got a job as a secretary at a bank. For more than two decades, she got up at 5 a.m., put on a suit and took the bus to work, arriving first at the office. Eventually — and much more slowly than her male counterparts — she advanced and was promoted to vice president. She earned more money than her husband, and her job became a "source of delicacy and bitterness" for the couple, Obama wrote in Dreams.
Dunham was motivated by "the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancestors," he wrote. "So long as you kids do well, Bar," she would tell him, "that's all that really matters."
Since the campaign began, Dunham has watched her grandson on TV from her apartment, avidly following his campaign. This week, for two days at least, the candidate will come to watch her.