Obama's Family Once Lived in Ponca City

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http://www.poncacitynews.com/templates/293769588632707.bsp


Obama's Family Once Lived in PC



By BEVERLY BRYANT

News Staff Writer

A girl who started school in Ponca City in the 1940s grew up to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology, taught English in a U.S. Embassy school in Indonesia and started the microfinance program in Indonesia in the late 1980s, granting small loans to poor entrepreneurs.

She also had a son who became president of the United States.

Ponca City was home to President Barack Obama's mother and grandparents in the late 1940s and early 1950s, The Ponca City News confirmed Friday.

Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in 1942 in Kansas. Her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, lived in Ponca City from about 1948 to 1951.

Records from the vault of the Ponca City Schools Administration offices show Stanley Ann attended first and second grade at Jefferson Elementary School, which once was located on Ponca Avenue between Elm Street and Osage Street. A portion of the school currently houses the Child Development Center. She first was admitted to Jefferson in September of 1948.

While she was a student at Jefferson, the Dunham family lived in a duplex on West Central Avenue.

In September 1950, the president's mother transferred to Roosevelt Elementary School, where she attended third grade. School records and other sources showed the family moved to an address on North Thirteenth Street.

Stanley Dunham brought his family to Ponca City from Wichita when he accepted a job as a salesman at the Jay Paris Furniture Store.

Patricia Paris Moore, Jay Paris' daughter, said Friday she remembered Dunham as a joker when he worked in her father's store.

Articles from 1949 in the archives of The Ponca City News named Dunham as a salesman at the furniture store in 1949.

From Ponca City the Dunham family moved to Vernon, Texas, school records showed.

The city's connection to the 44th president of the United States was noted in less than a sentence in a Washington Post article published August 22, 2008, less than three months before the presidential election.

The article, which included considerable biographical information about Obama's mother, largely escaped notice until Ponca City resident and blogger Hugh Pickens read a post by 1988 Ponca City High School graduate Dale Smith about the article. Pickens has written about Obama's family on his blog, "Ponca City We Love You," at http://peacecorpsonline.typepad.com/poncacityweloveyou/.

The Washington Post article, as well as a biography in Time Magazine in April 2008, indicate the family moved around the country, from Kansas to Ponca City, to Texas and California, ending up in Seattle when Stanley Ann was in high school.

When she finished high school, the family moved again, to Honolulu, where she enrolled at the University of Hawaii.

She met Barack Obama Sr. in a college Russian class, Time reported, and they married Feb. 2, 1961, when she was 18. The future president was born in August.

The senior Obama returned to his home in Kenya and the couple divorced in Honolulu in January 1964, Time reported. He died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.

When young Obama was nearly 2, his mother, now using the name Ann, returned to college and earned her bachelor's degree. She met Lolo Soetoro, whom she married in 1967. He was the father of Obama's half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who was born in 1970 in Indonesia.

In 1971, she sent her son Obama back to live with his grandparents, the Dunhams, in Hawaii. A year later she and her daughter also returned to Hawaii, where she enrolled in a master's program at the University of Hawaii to study the anthropology of Indonesia, Time reported. She divorced her second husband in 1980.

When Obama was 14, his mother decided to return to Indonesia to do fieldwork for her Ph.D. Obama stayed in Hawaii with his grandparents.

She completed her 1,000-page dissertation in 1992, Time reported, the same year her father died.

Just a few years later she was diagnosed with ovarian and uterine cancer and died at age 52 on Nov. 7, 1995, as Obama was starting his first campaign for the Illinois state senate.

Madelyn Dunham, Obama's grandmother and last living parental figure, became ill in November, two weeks before election day. Obama left the campaign trail to fly to Honolulu to spend time with her.

She died, with Obama's sister by her side, on Nov. 3, 2008, the day before Obama was elected president.


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Published Sun, Feb 8, 2009, On Page 1 A
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Copyright ©1998-2009 The Ponca City News

[HazMatCFO]

Ponca City suck ups trying to get a slice of "Stimulus money". I got my eye on you out west, you're sneaky sneaky.

[Gaspar]

. . . and Obama is God (Or at least a Border's Books in Dallas thinks so).  

Therefore, God Lived In Ponca City Once.

[cannon_fodder]

Did they work for ConoccoPhillips?