Posting for Albertafriend:
In dreams when O writes about his father’s visit in 71 and tells what they would be doing, he includes that they would be going by the “remodelled hospital” where he was born. Since they were already living in the apartment where his grandparents last made their home and Kapiolani Hospital is very near there, I would assume that they would walk by it or perhaps in the book he says they would drive by. I do have a link to Dreams online somewhere in my vast number of Obama links but I can’t find it to check it out. Maybe it was on pg. 39 where he talks about seeing his previous homes. Since it is also claimed that he was born in Queen’s hospital, I thought I would try to find out if either of them had undergone renovation by 71 so that one of them could be eliminated. Anyway, Kapiolani was merged with another maternity hospital called Kauikeolani in 1976. I contacted Kapiolani about this and they told me. I also asked them about any renovations and they said that Kapio underwent renovation and expansion in the 1970’s in anticipation of the merger. I also found a story—I think it may have been an obituary about some guy who was a menber of Kapio’s Board of Trustees which mentioned that the merger of the two hospitals was completed in either 1978 or 1979. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to refind that little article—I’ll give it one more try though when I finish this. All of this means that there was no “REMODELLED hospital” in 1971 so the author of Dreams is messing with history again. This was 5 years before the merger so it seems to me that nothing much if anything would have been done by that time. This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t born in Kapio if he WAS actually born in Honolulu but the word “remodelled” casts a falseness to the claim. He may have also remembered the remodelling that was done later in the 70s and inaccurately remembered when it actually took place thinking it had already been done back in 71.
