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To: Protect the Bill of Rights

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.”


413 posted on 02/05/2009 6:31:17 PM PST by maggief
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To: maggief

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.


415 posted on 02/05/2009 7:07:14 PM PST by I. Ben Hurt
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