Here’s the story: Nelson was having dinner at the Outrigger Canoe Club on Waikiki Beach with Dr. West, the father of her college friend, Jo-Anne. Making conversation, Nelson turned to Dr. West and said: “‘So, tell me something interesting that happened this week,’” she recalls.
His response: “Well, today, Stanley had a baby. Now that’s something to write home about.”
In this remark to Nelson, I do not see the doctor saying he delivered Obama. He may well be saying he read the announcement placed in the newspaper.
The new mother was Stanley (later referred to by her middle name of Ann) Dunham, and the baby was Barack Hussein Obama.
We all read the newspaper article that gave as much information.
“I penned the name on a napkin, and I did write home about it,” said Nelson, knowing that her father, Stanley A. Czurles, director of the Art Education Department at Buffalo State College, would be interested in the “Stanley” connection.
What STANLEY connection?
She also remembers Dr. West mentioning that the baby’s father was the first black student at the University of Hawaii and how taken he was by the baby’s name.
Now that is something to write home about, Hussein is a name we all are taken by.
Rather than think Nelson made this up I think the reporter took liberties.
I sincerely doubt that Obama Sr. was the first black student at the University of Hawaii. It’s likely, though, that he was the first from Kenya.
There WERE other black students at the University of Hawaii, both male and female, at the time. While there were relatively few, they were not unheard of.
And, don’t forget, this was much later than the GI Bill students from WWII and the Korean War would have gone through the higher education system. Given the number of GIs that were stationed in Hawaii from 1940 onward, it is a statistical certainty that some American blacks would have attended UH during the 1950s. There were certainly some there in the early sixties, and some I can remember by name. One was my roommate.