Ken Harms began teaching at Honolulu, Hawaii’s prestigious Punahou School the same year a future president walked into Mabel Hefty’s fifth-grade class.
It was 1971 and the round cheeked kid known as “Barry” Obama had just moved back to his home state of Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents so that he could attend the large private college-prep school, to which he earned a scholarship.
“He stood out with his ability to work within the multi-level culture that was there,” said Harms, 68, of Snohomish, who taught junior high school science.
Barack Obama was never a student of his, but Harms has always remembered Obama’s gift of bringing diverse people together.
Obama was one of a few black students enrolled at the school, where many kids came from more affluent families than his own.
Steve Case, founder of America Online, graduated from Punahou during Obama’s freshman year.
Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr. was a Kenyan native; his mother, Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas. The two met and fell in love while attending the University of Hawaii.
His parents divorced after a short-lived marriage and Dunham remarried fellow university student Lolo Soetoro, who later took the family to Jakarta, Indonesia. Obama spent four years of his childhood there, until moving back to Hawaii.
In a speech to Punahou students in 2004, Obama retraced his first days at the school.
“One of the challenges for a 10-year-old boy coming to a new place is to figure out how you fit in,” he said that day. “And it was a challenge for me, partly because I was one of the few African-Americans in the school, partly because I was new and a lot of the students had been together since kindergarten.”
While his inner feelings and struggle with his own racial identity was complex, Obama later reflected on how his multiethnic existence in Hawaii shaped his world view.
Nathaniel Healy, the high school principal at Seattle’s private Lakeside School, grew up on the palm-tree-lined Punahou campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
His father, Winston Healy, was principal of Punahou’s high school for more than three decades.
The junior Healy, who was 8 when Obama graduated in 1979, remembers the lanky Obama as a left-handed reserve forward for the school’s varsity basketball team.
In Obama’s senior year, the team won the state championship. Healy was a big fan.
“I remember watching Barry the bench warmer, but I do not have any other recollections beyond that,” Healy said.
What Healy does remember is a school and a state “where our concepts of race and culture that exist on the mainland are turned on their head.”
As an alumnus of the school, Healy said that he is proud.
“But more importantly, I’m excited for the country,” he said. “I think that somebody who grew up in a culture that is more pluralistic in its orientation is going to benefit the United States.”
In an essay for Punahou’s fall 1999 newsletter, Obama wrote that his calling to a career in politics is somewhat rooted in his Hawaiian upbringing.
“Hawaii’s spirt of tolerance might not have been perfect or complete, but it was — and is — real,” he wrote. “The opportunity that Hawaii offered — to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect — became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear.”
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
