STANLEY ARMOUR DUNHAM
'Gramps had entered the space age'
When he was 8 years old, Stanley Armour Dunham found his mother's body.
It was 1926, and Ruth Armour Dunham had committed suicide at the age of 26.
(Courtesy of The Obama Family)
Barack Obama has written that that tragic discovery might have contributed to making his grandfather "a bit wild" as a teenager in Wichita, Kansas.
After he was kicked out of high school "for punching the principal in the nose," the man Obama would later know as "Gramps" hopped freight trains and dabbled in "moonshine, cards and women," Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father.
With his marriage to Obama's grandmother, Dunham settled into a respectable life as a furniture salesman. But he never lost his itch for adventure, moving his family from Kansas to Texas to Washington state and finally to Hawaii.
"His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II," Obama wrote in his book. "Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment."
Dunham and his wife, Madelyn, helped their daughter, Stanley Ann, raise Obama after her marriage to Obama's Kenyan father fell apart.
"One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandfather's shoulders as the astronauts from one of the Apollo missions arrived at Hickam Air Force Base after a successful splashdown," Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father.
"I remember the astronauts, in aviator glasses, as being far away, barely visible through the portal of an isolation chamber. But Gramps would always swear that one of the astronauts waved just at me and that I waved back. It was part of the story he told himself. With his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space age."
Dunham died in Honolulu at the age of 73 in 1992 -- four years before his grandson won his first political office.
"I can tell you Stanley would be right proud of Barack," said Virginia Goeldner, 72, Stanley Dunham's half-sister. "He was a wonderful fella, and he was very, very proud of Barack. . . . And we're really proud of Barack."