I find it odd that that article cannot be found & that it has not been reprinted by the paper. But also, see below: 1959!!
“Obama, who emphasized the first syllable of his first name, unlike his son who emphasizes the second, lived for a while at the YMCA. In a 1959 interview with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Obama, described the absence of racial prejudice in Hawaii as “unique.” No one, he marveled, “seems to be conscious of color.””
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/09/21/a_fathers_charm_absence?mode=PF
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Excerpt from Dreams:
There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn’t tell me why he had left. They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else’s narrative. An attractive prop-the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl-but a prop nonetheless.
I don’t really blame my mother or grandparents for this. My father may have preferred the image they created for him- indeed, he may have been complicit in its creation. In an article published in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin upon his graduation, he appears guarded and responsible, the model student, ambassador for his continent.
He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding-a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the fact that “Caucasians” in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.
I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school. It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him. No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.
2 Articles??
A story in the Star-Bulletin on the day he left, June 22, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son.
Many years later, Barack Jr., then in high school, found a clipping of the article in a family stash of birth certificates and old vaccination forms. Why wasn’t his name there, or his mother’s? He wondered, he later wrote, “whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.”
On his way east, Obama stopped in San Francisco and went to dinner at the Blue Fox in the financial district with Hal Abercrombie, who had moved to the city with his wife, Shirley.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082201679_5.html