A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother Page 3

  The dark secret in the Dunham boys’ childhood involved a hunting trip with their father. The elder Ralph Dunham, born in Argonia, Kansas, in 1894, had arrived in Wichita at age twenty and married Ruth Lucille Armour the following year. According to their marriage license, filed with the probate court in Sedgwick County in October 1915, Ruth was eighteen. But her gravestone at Sunset Lawns Cemetery in El Dorado, where she was buried eleven years later, gives the year of her birth as 1900. If the gravestone is correct, she was no more than sixteen when she married. Her eldest son, Ralph, was born in 1916; Stanley followed a year and a half later in 1918. Their father was dashing, it was said in the family. His occupational history suggests he was restless. In a military registration card filled out in June 1917, he described himself as a self-employed café owner in Wichita. In 1923, he was listed in the El Dorado city directory as working in sales at the El Dorado Garage. A few years after that, he owned an automobile dealership, repair shop, and garage in Topeka. When that failed, he ran a drugstore in Wichita with his parents. His obituary in The Wichita Eagle in 1970 described him as a retired Boeing Company employee. It was a pattern not unlike the one that his younger son, Stanley, would follow some years later. Perhaps it was a distant antecedent to the wanderlust that Maya Soetoro-Ng would one day say she inherited from her adventurous mother, Stanley Ann.

  On Thanksgiving in 1926, the young Dunham family, Ralph and Ruth Dunham and their two boys, traveled from their home in Topeka to Melvern to hunt and spend the holiday with a sister and brother of Ralph Sr.’s. A detailed account of the day appeared on the front page of The Topeka State Journal the following afternoon. Ralph Sr. and Ruth had “a disagreement” after arriving in Melvern, the article stated. When Ralph Sr. and his brother left the house with the boys to go hunting, Ruth Dunham, the boys’ mother, departed for Topeka. She made her way to a drugstore near the Dunhams’ home and near her husband’s garage. She told the owner, George W. Lawrence, that a dog had been run over by a car and that she wanted to buy something to kill it. “Lawrence recommended chloroform,” the newspaper reported. “Mrs. Dunham said that she didn’t want that, as the smell of chloroform made her sick. She finally persuaded Lawrence to sell her ten grains of strychnine. She stayed in the store for several minutes, Lawrence said, seemingly in the best of spirits and joking with the proprietor.”

  Later that evening, the owner of an auto-painting shop in the same building as Ralph Dunham’s garage noticed Ruth in the office, apparently writing, when he went to put away his car. A half-hour later, George Lawrence, who also parked in the garage, saw her, too. Back in Melvern, Ralph had returned from hunting and learned that his wife had left. He returned to Topeka, found no one at home, and began a search. Shortly before two a.m., he found his wife’s body on the garage office floor, the article stated. Though an ambulance took the body to St. Francis Hospital, the newspaper quoted the county coroner as having said Ruth Dunham had been dead for anywhere between a few minutes and two hours, and that the death was a suicide. She had written a letter saying she had taken poison because her husband no longer loved her, the newspaper reported. She was twenty-six years old.

  A rather different version of Ruth’s death appeared on the same day on the second page of the newspaper in El Dorado, where her parents, Harry and Gabriella Armour, lived with Ruth’s sister, Doris, the recently named Miss El Dorado. According to that account, put forward from that time on for public consumption, Ruth died of ptomaine poisoning at home in Topeka. She had spoken by telephone with her parents just hours before, the newspaper reported, “and was apparently in the best of health.” An article in The Wichita Eagle went one step further: “Mrs. Dunham had been feeling well up to a late hour Thursday night and it is believed that food eaten at a Thanksgiving dinner was responsible for her death.”

  Stanley Dunham, at age eight, and his brother, Ralph, age ten, went to live with their maternal grandparents—just as Stanley’s grandson, Barack Obama, at age ten, would do forty-five years later. Stanley and Ralph’s father moved to Wichita to run a drugstore with his father; he lived next door to his parents in an apartment above the store. Apparently, the boys inquired as to why they were not living with their father. “My father’s answer to that was that my grandparents dearly loved us and that he wasn’t about to take us away from them,” Ralph Dunham told me. “However, the fact was that he was dead broke at the time, and he couldn’t afford to take proper care of us. And my grandfather had a good job.” After their father remarried and had two more children, Stanley and Ralph barely saw him. “Well, we did once in a while if we were in Wichita or something like that,” Ralph said. “We’d see him. But very rarely.” Asked if he and Stanley had known their half sisters at that time, he said, “No, not at all.”

  Recalling that period eighty years later, Ralph skated quickly past his mother’s death and made no mention of suicide. His mother passed away, the Depression happened, his father’s business collapsed, and he and Stanley moved in with their grandparents in El Dorado. When I described the article in the Topeka newspaper, he said simply, “I was only ten years old. Of course, I was told the ptomaine-poisoning story. But that could have been possible.” He knew his mother had left a note, but, he said, he never knew what it said. He seemed to have retained a small child’s distorted memory of that day—small details magnified, central drama swept into the shadows. “Actually, she went to the hospital and died in the hospital, I know that,” he said. “My grandparents came down. Of course, we were glad to see them. We didn’t realize my mother was in the hospital or anything like that. We had seen a game—I can remember it was a board game, and the game was Uncle Wiggily. They gave us some money to go down to the drugstore to buy this Uncle Wiggily game. And when we came back from that, then they told us that my mother had died.”

  The boys moved into what became, with their arrival, a four-generation household. It included their grandparents, the boys’ Aunt Doris, and their great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Clark, a Civil War veteran, then in his early eighties. The Armours had been teachers, Ralph Dunham said. But Mr. Armour, a lover of math and math puzzles, had discovered that he could make more money as an oil-field pumper, using his math skills to calculate the oil levels in tanks. He worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. A few years after Stanley and Ralph moved in, the Armours moved the family, minus Aunt Doris, to an oil lease eight miles from El Dorado by gravel road. Ralph, who said he inherited his interest in math and teaching from his grandparents, recalled life in the reconfigured family fondly. His grandmother, about forty years old when her daughter died, was young enough to be her grandsons’ mother—just as Madelyn would be when her grandson would first move in with her and Stanley in Honolulu in 1971. Doris Armour was young enough to be the boys’ sister. Stanley and Ralph developed a passion for games, particularly checkers, from their grandfather and great-grandfather. Many years later, when Stanley and Madelyn had become grand masters in duplicate bridge in Hawaii, he would want to play checkers on his occasional visits to Ralph’s home in Virginia. The last time they played, it was getting late, Ralph was tired, and Stanley had a flight to catch. Ralph suggested they quit, but Stanley was one game behind. “He insisted he wasn’t going to quit,” Ralph recalled. “So I really concentrated, and I beat him the next three games. Then he would go.”

  Stanley was dark-haired and handsome, like his father. He matured earlier than Ralph and prided himself on his looks. At twenty-three years old, he was nearly six feet tall and weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds, according to his military records. The most striking feature on his large head was a powerful, elongated chin—which Stanley Ann would inherit and pass on to her son. In the head shots in the 1936 El Dorado High School annual, The Gusher, Stanley’s chin looks twice as long as anyone else’s. Thick black hair rolls back off his forehead in glistening waves. His mouth is compact. On occasion, he had a slightly quizzical tilt to his head—a familial trait I had first noticed one day while watching Stanle
y Ann in a video made a few years before her death. At that moment, I remembered seeing that tilt in Obama. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Ralph Dunham said of his great-nephew. “When he makes a speech, as Madelyn says, ‘He looks just like Stanley, only he’s black.’”

  As a boy, Stanley did not fit the mold: That is the way Ralph put it. Ralph was the Boy Scout, the future scoutmaster who graduated at the top of his class at El Dorado Junior College. Stanley, a year and a half younger, was, Ralph said, “a Dennis the Menace type.” He liked to do unusual things, Ralph said, maybe because he wanted attention. At three years old, he ran away from home with the boy next door. He had a knack for getting into trouble. “He was a nonconformist, I’d say,” Ralph said. “He didn’t like to follow rules just because they were rules. He liked to have a reason for them. He liked to be a little bit daring.” For a teenager in small-town Kansas, Stanley was a flamboyant dresser. He struck some as a born salesman: He could strike up a conversation with almost anybody, it seemed. He was opinionated, occasionally even pompous and overbearing. He had a temper. “If people disagreed with him, he could be very unpleasant,” Ralph said. “He could make it very uncomfortable.” He was a great teller of stories, some of which appeared to be intended to demonstrate his worldliness and sophistication. He was not above embroidering his tales, even making a few up. Take the one about the time he and a friend bummed a ride from the president, Herbert Hoover. Hoover was visiting El Dorado while en route to the West Coast, and the whole town turned out to watch. The way Stanley and his friend told the story later, they skipped the parade and were walking down the highway when the president’s car stopped and picked them up. After they got settled, Stanley’s friend lit a cigarette. According to the story, Ralph Dunham told me, Hoover leaned over and laid dibs on the remainder when Stanley’s friend was finished. The president, according to Stanley, said, “Butts on that.”

  Ralph said he had doubts about another Stanley story, recounted in Dreams from My Father. According to that story, Stanley was thrown out of high school by the time he was fifteen for punching the principal in the nose, and spent the next three years living off odd jobs, hopping railcars to Chicago and California and back home, and “dabbling in moonshine, cards, and women.” Ralph Dunham remembered all that rather differently. He said Stanley dropped out of the El Dorado High School class of 1935 in his senior year, most likely because he was not doing well academically, and returned some years later to graduate. “I won’t say that he hadn’t been in trouble and maybe had seen the principal,” Ralph said. “But I think that’s a story that was made up. My brother could have told Barack that, of course. My brother wasn’t always truthful about stuff like that.”

  STANLEY ANN’S MATERNAL grandmother, Leona, was the sixth of seven children of Margaret Belle Wright and Thomas Creekmore McCurry. Leona grew up on the McCurry farm in Peru and became a teacher, as did her unmarried sister, Ruth, who taught school for fifty years in Kansas and in Commerce, Oklahoma.

  Thomas and Margaret McCurry, great-grandparents of Ann Dunham, in Peru, Kansas

  Their brother, Frank W. McCurry, who climbed derricks as a child in Peru and went on to become a pharmacist, a chemical engineer, and an oil company vice president, acquired a certain degree of fame, as an adult, for an unusual hobby. Over forty-five years, he built, fine-tuned, and continually updated a fully functioning scale model of an oil refinery, made largely out of glass. The model refinery, which had two catalytic cracking units and actually produced gas from oil, traveled to high schools and colleges all across the country. Frank McCurry’s daughter, Margaret McCurry Wolf, told me on a sweltering summer day in her kitchen in Hutchinson, Kansas, “Next to godliness and cleanliness, my dad was for education.”

  Leona’s mind, too, ranged far beyond the four walls of the little house in Augusta where she and her husband, Rolla Charles Payne, raised Stanley Ann’s mother, Madelyn, and her three siblings in the 1930s and 1940s. To her children, Leona seemed uncommonly bright. She took them outside under the vast night skies and taught them the constellations. She stocked the house with good books and planned car trips during her husband’s monthlong summer vacation—trips to Civil War battlefields in Missouri; to Yellowstone Park; to the Black Hills; to Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana; to Washington State. In the summer of 1934, in the midst of the Depression and before the youngest Payne was born, the family drove to Chicago, along with two schoolteacher maiden aunts, to see the World’s Fair. “I think that World’s Fair was a transforming event for all three of us kids,” Charles Payne, Madelyn’s brother, said. “It was so far beyond the experience of Augusta, Kansas, that it was a true eye-opener. We were exposed to art, anthropology, intellectual stuff. I remember eating lunch at a German beer garden—all the dancing girls with German accents. At the Swedish pavilion, we watched them make a ceramic sugar bowl and creamer in a sleek, modern design. We still have them, and they’re damn good-looking. I remember seeing models of ships—was the Field Museum open then?—in such fine detail, down to bolts and knobs, and marveling at the fact that anybody could do that. There was probably a drive, for all three of us after that, to get out of small-town Kansas and into a more cosmopolitan setting. I remember trying to tell some friends about it and finding I was not able to convey the magnificence of it verbally.”

  That trip, he said, probably helped ensure that he and his siblings left Augusta behind them “almost as soon as we could.”

  Madelyn’s father, Rolla Charles Payne, had grown up on his family’s farm in Olathe and had gone to work for the Sinclair Oil and Gas Company as a bookkeeper and later as district clerk in Augusta. (The name Rolla, which rhymes with “wallah,” is said to have ranked among the top five hundred most popular boys’ names for a time near the end of the nineteenth century. Rolla Payne, however, did not love it. He went by the initials R.C. or simply Payne, the name by which Leona addressed him.) A veteran of World War I, R. C. Payne appears to have met Leona McCurry in Independence, where they were living and working. They received a marriage license in December 1921, and their first child, Madelyn Lee, was born on October 26, 1922, in Peru. By the time Charles and Margaret Arlene were born several years later, the family had moved to Augusta, another former farming community transformed by oil, eighteen miles southwest of El Dorado. By the end of World War I, there were three refineries in Augusta and ten thousand people living within a five-mile radius—from the families of oil company executives to laborers on the oil leases and a small community of Mexicans employed by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway and living in an enclave bounded by the Walnut River, South Osage Street, and the Santa Fe tracks. A two-lane brick highway to Wichita opened in 1924, the year a twister roared into town, tore a corner off the high school, and demolished a Catholic church. Jon Payne, the youngest of the four Payne children, who spent his entire childhood in Augusta until his parents moved during his senior year in high school to a tiny oil-field community called Thrall, said he had never met a black person until he went away to college at the University of Kansas.

  Butler County was almost entirely white and Christian when Madelyn Payne was growing up in Augusta and Stanley Dunham in El Dorado in the 1920s and 1930s. Recruiters for the Ku Klux Klan moved into the county in the early 1920s, billing the Klan as a patriotic Christian benevolent association. Roxie Olmstead, who grew up in Butler County and later did some research on the Klan, found that the organization advanced north from Oklahoma, recruiting what it called “native born, white, Protestant, Gentile, American” citizens. Klan chapters met in churches, held initiation ceremonies in robes and on horseback, and burned crosses. The focus was moral issues, Roxie Olmstead reported in a paper available at the Butler County Historical Society, such as “faithless husbands and wives in Augusta.” There was a Klan parade in Augusta in September 1923; a meeting in El Dorado in August 1924 reportedly attracted three thousand people. The name of the Kaffir Corn Carnival was changed, for 1924 only, to the Kaffir Korn Kar
nival. William Allen White, who had been editorializing against the Klan since 1921 in The Emporia Gazette, ran as an independent candidate for governor in 1924 on what for much of the campaign was an anti-Klan platform. He came in third out of three, but historians say his campaign weakened the Klan. The following year, the state supreme court banned it from operating in Kansas.

  For much of Madelyn’s childhood, the family lived in a single-story wood-frame house owned by the Sinclair Oil and Gas Company, and next door to the office where her father, R. C. Payne, worked. The house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a screened-in back porch, where Charles sometimes slept on a cot. Space was tight. Aunt Ruth McCurry, the teacher, came to stay every summer, bunking in the girls’ room. Stanley Ann, as an infant and toddler, lived there during World War II while her father was in the Army and her mother commuted to Wichita for work. Out back, there was a pipe yard and a net for “moonlight basketball.” Baseball was played in a nearby vacant lot. Jon Payne remembered helping his mother wash the laundry in a couple of round Maytag washers equipped with wringers and watching the sheets freeze in winter. It was an easy walk along the tree-lined brick streets into town, where there were drugstores with soda fountains and booths, a couple of them with jukeboxes stocked by the late 1930s with the music of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey, and even a small floor for dancing. In the booths, some of the high school students played bridge. During the Depression, people in Augusta went to the movies several times a week. There were cowboy movies at the Isis Theatre on weekends, and the Augusta Theatre, which opened in the summer Madelyn was twelve, was the first to be lit entirely by neon. People flocked to movies starring Bette Davis, from whom teenage girls picked up a veneer of sophistication and learned how to hold a cigarette for maximum glamorous effect. For a time, an instructor from a dance studio in Wichita came in to teach a dozen children ballroom dancing and the jitterbug on the stage of the theater. On Sundays, the Paynes attended the Methodist church. They were not poor—Mr. Payne worked through the Depression—but there was never a lot of money. Madelyn’s brother Charles worked in a grocery store up to twenty hours a week and full-time in summer all through high school. Jon was probably in the eighth grade, he said, before he wore “store-bought pants.” Leona made many of her children’s clothes. Charles Payne, a lifelong Democrat, told me that his mother’s family voted Republican but that his father was a Democrat. He remembered the family listening to radio broadcasts of the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and later his fireside chats. When Alf Landon, the then governor of Kansas, became the Republican presidential nominee running against Roosevelt in the 1936 election, the Paynes backed him: “We were waving sunflower flags.”