Posted on 12/14/2008 3:52:20 PM PST by jetxnet
According to legend he and Michelle went to Bali so he could complete writing without interrupion. Drugs aren’t exactly popular there and result in extremely stiff sentences. It is as if he was writing the fairytale with only one thought in mind, to advance himself and create a background, which doesn’t mesh with what we do know and are still finding out. He actually told David Mendell that anything Mendell wanted to know about him could be found by reading his book. If the book were published today it would have to be published as fiction!
Seems to me I read, maybe on one of the threads about Ayers likely being a ghost write - that 0bama went to Bali to “write” but didn’t get much writing done there. I wonder what he was doing there? Brushing up on his Bahasa? Connecting up with Muslim roots? Of course, on Bali they’re mostly a type of Hindu. I wonder if he really stayed in Bali the whole time? It was quite a long time. Maybe Bali was just a port of call. Sure would be interesting to know what he did during that time, and if he traveled anywhere besides Bali.
http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/did_bill_ayers_write_1.htm
As Osnos relates, a 1990 New York Times profile on Harvard’s first black editor caught the eye of a hustling young literary agent named Jane Dystel.
Dystel persuaded Obama to put a book proposal together, and she submitted it. Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, signed on and authorized a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where the University of Chicago offered him an office and stipend to help him write. Obama dithered.
At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
According to Osnos, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract and likely asked that Obama return at least some of the advance.
Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.
Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled wannabe into a literary superstar.
That’s where I read it, thanks. I wonder how long he was in Bali. Interesting that he “all of a sudden” was able to write, once he got back in Chicago.
Yep. What a revelation he had! :)
I just found a new article posted at the University of Hawaii at Manoa written about Ann Dunham. It includes some pictures of her in Bali in the 1990’s. Here is the link:
http://www.hawaii.edu/malamalama/2009/01/lessons-for-president-obama/
The picture of her in Bali is the top right hand one. What is interesting is a link within the comments where her faculty advisor, Alice Dewey, says Ann’s B.A. was in Anthropology while the email from Stuart Lau advises that Ann received a B.A. in Math in August 1966. Nice contradiction between UH records and a faculty advisor!
Yikes. Nothing is what it seems with these people. What was AD doing in Bali - more micro loans?
I guess he had a little help from his friend/s.
According to the article, she’s Mahamta Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Johnny Appleseed all rolled into one.
Ann completed requirements for the MA in 1974 [although it was not formally granted until 1986].
Thanks! I’ll check out some names.
According to Alice Dewey Ann took the job in micro-finance whch led to a delay in her receiving her M.A. I was just wondering if she received her B.A. in Math with a minor in Anthropology because I cannot see the Registrar, Stuart Lau, making such a mistake in checking records? Maybe I should have added a barf alert warning along with the link? lol
Payne siblings:
Madelyn
Charles
Margaret Arlene
Jack
Obama’s grandmother taught him accountability, self reliance
Charleston Gazette (WV) - Sunday, August 24, 2008
Author: Allen G. Breed The Associated Press
EXCERPT - no link
Madelyn Lee Payne was born in October 1922 in the tiny town of Peru, Kan. Not long thereafter, Rolla Payne moved his young family to the nearby boomtown of Augusta, population about 5,000.
It was a place that Obama would describe in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” as one “where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”
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 the 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.”
Rolla and Leona Payne are buried at Highland Cemetary, Winfield, KS. Our local paper, the Winfield Courier did a big story about Obama’s great-grandparents and their ties to our community. The Paynes retired to Winfield where they lived for about 12 years before their deaths in 1968. Their grave stone reads, Rolla Charles Payne, born Aug 23, 1892; died Oct 15, 1968: Leona McCurry Payne, born May 7, 1897; died Mar 22, l968. He died approx six months after she did. The couple had joined the First Methodist Church in Winfield. According to the paper, a few locals remember them. I never met them as I lived in the country.
Question:
Supposedly Stanley Ann met Obama Sr in a Russian class at UH.
Is Russian a common course for an incoming college freshman? In the 60’s?
Maybe that’s why Michelle was so excited after Obama threw grandma’s ashes into the ocean, she jumped up on Obama, legs first.
Are you serious?
Did she indeed start that first UH semester late?
And, according to the story, she’s pregnant within six weeks. Hardly enough time for a cup of coffee.
Swisher-Taylor & Morris Funeral Home has the records of the Paynes’ deaths. Leona died on March 22, 1968, and Rolla on Oct. 22. The Courier published Leona’s obituary on March 23, 1968, and Rolla’s on Oct. 23, 1968.
Obama’s great-grandparents laid to rest in Winfield
Rolla and Leona Payne lived here and are buried at Highland Cemetery
By JUDITH ZACCARIA and TYLER GASKILL
With the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States less than two weeks away, people and communities are claiming all kinds of connections with him. This is certainly true in Kansas, where his mother’s family has roots.
Now Winfield can claim its own part of Obama because his great-grandparents - his mother’s grandparents - are buried here. Their graves are in the far southwest corner of the old section of Highland Cemetery.
On a 1917 draft registration, Rolla described himself as having a slender build, medium height, gray eyes and brown hair, according to a report from Fox News. At the time, Rolla was 24 and a bookkeeper for a Tulsa oil company. His home address was in Kansas.
“Caucasian” was scribbled on the form, the report said.
Rolla Charles and Leona McCurry Payne moved from Peru, in Chautauqua, where her family lived, to Augusta in 1925, just three years after the birth of Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn, according to a report from www.taylornews.org.
The Paynes lived in Winfield for about 12 years, from about 1956 to 1968, after Rolla retired from an oil company in El Dorado.
In Barack Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he wrote that Rolla managed an oil lease for Standard Oil, providing his family with steady income during the Depression and allowing the Paynes to lead a “respectable” life.
The Paynes “kept their house spotless and ordered ‘Great Books’ through the mail,” Obama wrote.
According to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times (Sept. 9, 2007), military records show that Rolla Payne worked as a bookkeeper for oil companies and their offshoots in Oklahoma and Kansas from at least 1917 to 1930. At least two of Leona’s brothers also worked in the oil industry, the article said.
The Paynes lived at 1221 Ann, a small, one-story ranch house, at the corner of Cherry, just east of Almedia Greever, who still lives at 1217 Ann. She remembers them well.
“They were very nice people,” Greever said. “They were retired when they came here.”
Greever was a school principal at the time, so she said most of her visiting was “over the back fence” with Leona and “at the end of the driveway” with Rolla.
“Mr. Payne liked to visit,” Greever said. When he saw her walking past his house on the way to her brother’s home in the next block, he would often go to the end of his driveway so they could chat when she was on her way home.
They joined the First United Methodist Church on April 20, 1958, according to the Roll of Full Membership of New Members, 1953-1985.
In his memoir, Obama speaks of the Paynes’ faith as being “a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both.” Obama’s denomination is the United Church of Christ.
Swisher-Taylor & Morris Funeral Home has the records of the Paynes’ deaths. Leona died on March 22, 1968, and Rolla on Oct. 22. The Courier published Leona’s obituary on March 23, 1968, and Rolla’s on Oct. 23, 1968.
It was Greever’s nephew, in fact, who found Mr. Payne after he died, she said.
“His wife died in the spring, and he wasn’t too well,” Greever said. “I hadn’t seen him or his car for a few days. I asked my nephew to check on him, to see if the car was in the garage and to see if he was home.”
The nephew saw the car was in the garage but received no answer when he knocked on the door. He looked in the windows and saw Mr. Payne slumped over in a chair in a room facing Greever’s house. He had already passed away.
Not many people who lived in the neighborhood when the Paynes did are still around. Susan Norton lived at 1615 Cherry, across Ann from the Paynes, but she remembers only news of Mrs. Payne’s death.
Editor’s note: Genealogist Marvalene Ray, Haysville, and Don Birney, Winfield, first gave us information for this story.
[picture of home and graves at link]
HT: maggief
(breaking my cross-posting rule, sorry all if you read it on the longer thread)
Swisher-Taylor & Morris Funeral Home has the records of the Paynes’ deaths. Leona died on March 22, 1968, and Rolla on Oct. 22. The Courier published Leona’s obituary on March 23, 1968, and Rolla’s on Oct. 23, 1968.
Obama’s great-grandparents laid to rest in Winfield
Rolla and Leona Payne lived here and are buried at Highland Cemetery
By JUDITH ZACCARIA and TYLER GASKILL
With the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States less than two weeks away, people and communities are claiming all kinds of connections with him. This is certainly true in Kansas, where his mother’s family has roots.
Now Winfield can claim its own part of Obama because his great-grandparents - his mother’s grandparents - are buried here. Their graves are in the far southwest corner of the old section of Highland Cemetery.
On a 1917 draft registration, Rolla described himself as having a slender build, medium height, gray eyes and brown hair, according to a report from Fox News. At the time, Rolla was 24 and a bookkeeper for a Tulsa oil company. His home address was in Kansas.
“Caucasian” was scribbled on the form, the report said.
Rolla Charles and Leona McCurry Payne moved from Peru, in Chautauqua, where her family lived, to Augusta in 1925, just three years after the birth of Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn, according to a report from www.taylornews.org.
The Paynes lived in Winfield for about 12 years, from about 1956 to 1968, after Rolla retired from an oil company in El Dorado.
In Barack Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he wrote that Rolla managed an oil lease for Standard Oil, providing his family with steady income during the Depression and allowing the Paynes to lead a “respectable” life.
The Paynes “kept their house spotless and ordered ‘Great Books’ through the mail,” Obama wrote.
According to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times (Sept. 9, 2007), military records show that Rolla Payne worked as a bookkeeper for oil companies and their offshoots in Oklahoma and Kansas from at least 1917 to 1930. At least two of Leona’s brothers also worked in the oil industry, the article said.
The Paynes lived at 1221 Ann, a small, one-story ranch house, at the corner of Cherry, just east of Almedia Greever, who still lives at 1217 Ann. She remembers them well.
“They were very nice people,” Greever said. “They were retired when they came here.”
Greever was a school principal at the time, so she said most of her visiting was “over the back fence” with Leona and “at the end of the driveway” with Rolla.
“Mr. Payne liked to visit,” Greever said. When he saw her walking past his house on the way to her brother’s home in the next block, he would often go to the end of his driveway so they could chat when she was on her way home.
They joined the First United Methodist Church on April 20, 1958, according to the Roll of Full Membership of New Members, 1953-1985.
In his memoir, Obama speaks of the Paynes’ faith as being “a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both.” Obama’s denomination is the United Church of Christ.
Swisher-Taylor & Morris Funeral Home has the records of the Paynes’ deaths. Leona died on March 22, 1968, and Rolla on Oct. 22. The Courier published Leona’s obituary on March 23, 1968, and Rolla’s on Oct. 23, 1968.
It was Greever’s nephew, in fact, who found Mr. Payne after he died, she said.
“His wife died in the spring, and he wasn’t too well,” Greever said. “I hadn’t seen him or his car for a few days. I asked my nephew to check on him, to see if the car was in the garage and to see if he was home.”
The nephew saw the car was in the garage but received no answer when he knocked on the door. He looked in the windows and saw Mr. Payne slumped over in a chair in a room facing Greever’s house. He had already passed away.
Not many people who lived in the neighborhood when the Paynes did are still around. Susan Norton lived at 1615 Cherry, across Ann from the Paynes, but she remembers only news of Mrs. Payne’s death.
Editor’s note: Genealogist Marvalene Ray, Haysville, and Don Birney, Winfield, first gave us information for this story.
[picture of home and graves at link]
HT: maggief
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