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But consistent with the 1950s, there were undercurrents of turmoil. In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Archipelago school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the Household Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a associate of the Communist Party.  At Mercer High School, two teachers — Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman — generated biweekly parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to contest societal norms and question all niceties of authority. Foubert, who died recently, taught English. His texts were sneering edge: “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Confederacy Man,” “The Hidden Persuaders,” “1984″ and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.  Wichterman taught metaphysics. The hallway between the two classes was known as “anarchy alley,” and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman’s teachings, including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard. He also touched the societal third by railway of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God. And he didn’t obstruct there.  ”I had them read ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ and the parents went nuts,” said Wichterman, adding that parents also didn’t desire any discussions about “anything to do with sex,” faith and theology. The parental protests were known as “mothers’ marches.”  ”The kids started questioning things that their folks reasoning shouldn’t be questioned — creed, politics, parental authority,” said John Go in search of, a classmate. “And a lot of parents didn’t like that, and they tried to get them [Wichterman and Foubert] fired.”  The Dunhams did not weld the uproar.

Madelyn and Stanley emanate their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in at Bellevue.  ”In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as ‘the insignificant Red church on the hill,’ ” said Peter Luton, the church’s postpositive major minister, referring to the effects of McCarthyism. Skepticism, the philanthropic that Stanley embraced and passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.  For Stanley Ann, the teachings of Foubert and Wichterman provided an wise man stimulant and an affirmation that there indeed was an interesting life-force beyond high school dances, football games and all-edge of night slumber party chatter.  Their high school order was an in-between generation. The Beat generation had passed, and the 1960s era of grumble was yet to begin. Classmates of Dunham — Fence, Blake, Hunt — felt they were on the cusp of societal novelty, the distant early warning of the ’60s struggles over courteous rights, women’s rights and war.  ”If you were involved about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would conscious about it first,” said Chip Partition, who described her as “a fellow traveler. . . . We were liberals before we knew what liberals were.”  One classmate, Jill Burton-Dascher, said Stanley Ann “was intellectually way more refined than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way.”  The two Stanleys, though, were not vital spirit mates. Stanley the father “was always welcoming to the kids, but he humiliated Stanley because he tried too hard,” Maxine Box said. The two would into, Box said, and Madelyn usually mediated.  Susan Blake said Stanley’s initiator was “always looking for a rise out of people,” Blake said. “It seemed like every heyday her father opened his mouth, she would enshroud a arrive her eyes.”  Full emergence in Hawaii  When the Mercer Atoll High School yearbooks began circulating in the spring of 1960, Stanley

Ann’s postpositive major year, classmates scribbled unsurpassed wishes to friends and remembered slumber parties, one mother’s exceptionally good-hearted chocolate cake and thoughts on some goofy boys.  Dunham wrote to Maxine Box: “Keep in mind me when you are old and gray. Love & Luck, Stanley.” Apparently out of the blue, her father had found a better chance — another furniture store, this one in Hawaii. “He at best couldn’t settle,” Box recalled.  ”I tip she didn’t want to go to Hawaii,” she added.  That was only the first bombshell. Stanley