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89 area black teens named scholarship semifinalists
Chicago Sun-Times - Thursday, September 25, 1986

EXCERPT

St. Ignatius - ... Michael A. Strautmanis ...

http://www.allbusiness.com/government/elections-politics-campaigns/12023812-1.html

“I was going to go to Mount Carmel High School,” Strautmanis said in an interview. He said he had “good hands” and had hoped to play tight end.

“My mother made me go to St. Ignatius [College Prep],” a school that at the time had no football team. “My mother wanted me to be in a disciplined environment and not play football. I was not pleased.... Now I’m very grateful.”

From St. Ignatius he went to the University of Illinois where he was a theater major, until he realized it wasn’t for him.

In the back of his head, he had the idea of being a lawyer. While in high school, Strautmanis had attended a street law class at the Loyola University Chicago College of Law, where he got to cross-examine a witness in a fictional criminal case.

He said he “loved that intellectual challenge.”

In 1990, while in college, he got a summer job as a bicycle messenger for Cannonball in Chicago and was assigned by Cannonball to the mail room at the law firm of Hopkins & Sutter.

“I then started to realize there was such a thing as law firms,” Strautmanis said. “I didn’t know any lawyers. I wanted to know what lawyers would be like.”

At Hopkins, “I started asking for a job for the next summer,” he said. “Someone told me another firm had a job, Sidley & Austin,” which was across the street.

He introduced himself to a woman in human resources at Sidley & Austin and then “called that poor woman once a week for a year.”

He was hired by Sidley as a paralegal soon after he graduated from college.

“I had zero paralegal training,” he said, but he did what he was assigned to do.

Strautmanis said he first became friends with Sidley associate Michelle Robinson, who was then engaged to Sidley associate Obama. Strautmanis assumed that Obama “was a geek” because Obama had been head of the Harvard Law Review.

Then, at the Sidley picnic, Obama turned out to be “a guy with a left-handed jump shot who kept getting that ... jump shot off against me,” Strautmanis recalled.

They, too, became friends, but Strautmanis described Obama and Robinson back then as “more mentors than friends.” When Strautmanis applied to the U of I College of Law, Obama gave him a letter of recommendation.

Strautmanis said he worked for a year for Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP in litigation after he got his law degree in 1994. He switched to Michael, Best & Friedrich LLP from 1995 to 1998 in labor and employment litigation.

But politics seemed to be what really called him.

Jesse Jackson Jr., who had been a year ahead of Strautmanis at U of I law, was running for Congress in 1995. Strautmanis said he worked on Jackson’s successful campaign. Strautmanis then worked in Chicago for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996, and he got to know attorney Daniel W. Hynes, a fellow a St. Ignatius grad, who in 1998 was elected comptroller of Illinois.

In 1998, Strautmanis got his first government appointment and went to work in Washington, D.C., as a special assistant to the general counsel at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Good info. One fact from the article--- How Strautmanis met BHO:

"Strautmanis said he first became friends with Sidley associate Michelle Robinson, who was then engaged to Sidley associate Obama. Strautmanis assumed that Obama “was a geek” because Obama had been head of the Harvard Law Review." "Then, at the Sidley picnic, Obama turned out to be “a guy with a left-handed jump shot who kept getting that ... jump shot off against me,” Strautmanis recalled."

BUT see here:

Obama and Strautmanis met on the basketball court at Robinson's [Michelle] uncle's house, "and we've all been friends ever since."

Mike Strautmanis Counselor for strategic engagement to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett (since January 2011)

I cannot find who Michelle's uncle could be. As far as I have been able to determine, both her father and mother were only children???

The above source also has good info for comparison.