Barack Obama by David Maraniss

Author:David Maraniss
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

In a survey of college admissions officers, Punahou was ranked among the ten best secondary schools in the nation. Mrs. Lucille Finlayson was reminded of that status almost every day in her administrative office on the first floor of Alexander Hall, where she arranged the visits of dozens of college recruitment officers and processed a total of 2,440 applications for the seniors, an average of six per student. The college representatives came in November and December, from Brown and Duke in the East, Coe College and Notre Dame in the Midwest, Pomona College and Southern Cal on the West Coast. The recruiter from Occidental, a small liberal arts school on the rim of Los Angeles, appeared at ten o’clock on the morning of November 16. Oxy was one of the more popular possibilities. It was away, on the mainland, but not too far away. Its campus was compact and handsome, its academic reputation first-rate, and both the cultural atmosphere and L.A. weather allowed for the wearing of shorts and slippers year-round. If one could imagine a higher educational branch of Punahou, in other words, Occidental was it. When decisions were made that spring, five Punahou seniors were accepted at Oxy, including two members of the championship basketball team, Jason Oshima and Barry Obama. So much for the idea Barry had tossed at his mother to alarm her—that he was of a mind to stay home for a year and work and go to school part-time. He might still be somewhat of a good-time Charlie, as she called him, but luck was coming his way. He had chosen Occidental, he said, largely because of a pretty girl he had met who was vacationing in Honolulu with her family. She was from Brentwood in L.A., and that was enough for him—along with the fact that he received a scholarship.

The imminent diaspora of Eric Kusunoki’s homeroom was fairly typical, with everyone college bound. The students who for four years had begun each school day in Mr. Kuz’s classroom would soon be going to Claremont, Colorado, Cornell, Harvard, Hawaii, Michigan, Montana, Occidental, Oregon, Oregon State, Santa Clara, and UC Santa Cruz. Only four were staying in Honolulu, including three slated to attend the university and one—not Barry Obama but Whitey Kahoohanohano—planning to work while attending Kapi‘olani Community College. One day in late May, a few weeks before graduation, the homeroom class posed for their yearbook photo. They had recently celebrated with an ice cream social at the president’s house, an academic honors assembly (no awards for Obama), a Senior Skip Day, and a Saturday-night potluck dinner at Mr. Kusunoki’s home in St. Louis Heights, chomping on chicken and hot dogs and playing with the teacher’s eighteen-month-old daughter. By then they had plotted how they wanted to look for posterity. On the scheduled morning of the photo shoot, with their time in homeroom extended for the occasion, they dashed out of Pauahi Hall, clambered into a caravan of cars, and drove to the Manoa Valley estate of classmate Julie Cooke, a descendant of Hawaii’s old haole oligarchy.

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