greg orme obama's friend

But I was pretty wrapped up in my own world back then.. After a recent lunch with a reporter, he winked at a table of faculty-lounge colleagues and joked, This one is with Playgirl.. As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result. But the foursome rarely goes more than a few months without reconvening in one arrangement or another. He attended a college basketball game with the first family the next day, and this week he and his wife hosted their annual barbecue for the other families, including those of the Obamas Chicago friends Eric Whitaker and Marty Nesbitt. He showed leadership and caring for his teammates, McLachlin said. We are just such a mixed-up bag of races. All three live mostly private lives when they're not being photographed with the commander in chief. At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. This is my man! a delighted Obama said, Maurer recalled. Bush remained pals with men he served with in World War II. Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called "Barry O'Bomber" by teammates. He was always very focused.. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes. "We live in a world of bullies and the U.S. has been bullied around. Obamas prom pictures released. Topolinski said neither he nor Obama were stars on their high school team. Barry spent his days at the Punahou School in Hawaii studying, shooting hoops and goofing off with his friends. ", We would be like, Hey lets go to the beach, Bendix recalled. He has ethnic Chinese mother and his father was Polish. But the reality of Obama's narrative is not that simple. I think hes done great with all the stuff he inherited, like the recession and the two wars. But Furushima, too, is learning to be on guard around the press. Anyone can read what you share. A spokeswoman for People said the reporter, West Coast correspondent Maureen Harrington, did not take the list. Hawaii friends Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme, Punahou Academy classmates, were also on hand. (AFP OUT) U.S. President-elect Barack Obama and friend Greg Orme (R) wait to warm up on the driving range to play golf with friends December 29, 2008 in Kailua, Hawaii. Greg Orme, a fellow varsity basketball player, was Obama's constant companion. The Secret Service stopped a man who briefly flew a drone near the president's motorcade Monday as the president and his friends were returning from golf at the Mid-Pacific Country Club. In his day, he was a better basketball player than a golfer. Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn't want him tagging along, followed a group of Adi's friends to a nearby swamp. He and I really clicked. Hes not like that.. The motorcade arrived in Kapolei around 11:30 a.m. ___ Barry was a very confident player who liked to drive to the basket. ', 'I'd made my share of friends at school, gone on the occasional awkward date,' Obama wrote, 'And if I sometimes puzzled over the mysterious realignments of status that took place among my classmates, as some rose and others fell depending on the whims of their bodies or the make of their cars, I took comfort in the knowledge that my own position had steadily improved.'. Among his supporters, his likability and credibility have only been boosted by his stories of being an outsider trying to fight his way in. Now that life story is being edited by others. And a young, iconoclastic white woman who had defied the social mores of the day by marrying a dashing black man from Kenya was coping with the fact that her new husband essentially had abandoned her and their young child in 1963 to study at Harvard. I hadnt seen him for 30 years.. Still, all of his teachers at the Catholic school recognized leadership qualities in him. The Latest: Obamas, friends tour Hawaii Islamic arts center "The brothers," as Lewis Anthony Jr., an African-American in the class of 1977 put it, hung out together, often talking about issues involving race and civil rights. While Obama rocketed to political prominence, his friend headed down the troubled road Obama had feared he was following. Some, like Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, counted later acquaintances among political donors as friends. Oblivious to all of this was a perpetually smiling toddler the entire family called Barry. The tenacity and determination Obama showed to make his high school basketball team was an early indicator of the greatness to come. 'We had great vibes between us.'. For much of their childhoods, Orme and Obama were more like brothers than buddies, constant companions both on and off the basketball court who even double-dated on senior prom night. They only did it to Barry." Their. His wife and daughters are skiing in Colorado. HONOLULU (AP) The Latest on President Barack Obama family vacation in Hawaii (all times local): 10 p.m. President Barack Obama and his family dined with friends Wednesday night to cap off another day of their Hawaii getaway. Alan Lum, who later would coach the basketball team at Punahou as well as teach elementary school there, recalled Obama as always being the first to confront coaches when he felt they were not fairly allotting playing time. McLachlin said he survived a severe stroke shortly before Obama was elected president in 2008. Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama's birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. Not one of `the brothers' As much as young Obama stood out physically in the classrooms of Indonesia, so, too, did he at Punahou School, the elite private prep academy his mother moved him back to Hawaii to attend. The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school--this time a predominantly Muslim one--where he was enrolled. "Looking back now, I'd say he really is kind of the perfect combination of all of them," said his half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. "He'd go right up to the coach during a game and say, `Coach, we're killing this team. "I never knew, until reading the book later, how much that night had upset him." "Not even close," he said, adding that Obama was dealing with "some inner turmoil" in those days. In August, Obama kicked off his 53rd birthday weekend golfing with the three friends in suburban Maryland before heading to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains. The three men Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg. "Suddenly we asked, `Where's Barry?' He even scored a basket," he said. The havoc time wreaks on fashion spares no one, not even the president of the United States. He also was one of the only neighborhood children whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school in an area populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal landowning Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. I remember when we were seniors in high school, somebody said Barry would be on the Supreme Court, he said. Her date was Greg Orme, Obama's best friend. He laughed and posed for photos with friends. For the past two weeks, he has been recharging on Oahu after an unpleasant year in the job. Left: Kelli Allmans OAHUAN 1979 Yearbook. So just get the f--- outta my face." "They own it and we in it. It is the same one that a young Obama wrote in the yearbook of a petite black-haired beauty named Kelli Furushima -- the object of his high school crush. In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. Titcomb and Orme are part of a group of Obama's friends who reunite in Hawaii every year, a practice that continued even after Obama became president. (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.) Obama and his Punahou School classmates Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme enjoyed a sunny and breezy day on the links. "I did say we were playing in their world," he explained, "but that had nothing to do with race. Once parked, they 'turned up their stereos playing Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult and Stevie Wonder, lit up some sweet-sticky Hawaiian buds and washed it down with green bottled beer (the Choom Gang preferred Heineken, Becks, and St. Pauli Girl).'. (Courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng ), The life stories, when the presidential candidate tells them, have a common theme: the quest to belong. You have reached your limit of 4 free articles. Obama Hits Russia, the Gym and the Beach Thursday, Dec. 29 Obamas presidential prospects have been fueled in large part by an arresting life story: The son of a Kenyan goatherder, he wrestled with his dual identities to become the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review and a member of the U.S. Senate. "He was a very provocative thinker. We had to prove ourselves, focus on playing good ball. HONOLULU -- Until recently, the players on Hawaiis 1979 state basketball championship team thought their glory days were behind them, consigned to yearbooks and faded newspaper clippings. Obama wrote in the lengthy yearbook note. "He lived across the street from school and before classes hed shoot baskets on the outside courts, then at lunch hed shoot more baskets, then Id have him for three hours, then hed go home, eat supper, and then be outside again shooting baskets.. When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, "Curang, curang!" But any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that he had a racially diverse group of friends--many of whom often would crowd into his grandparents' apartment, near Punahou, after school let out. We had great vibes between us, she told TIME. They're not his wife and daughters, who came with him, but a trio of pals whose friendship dates back to Obama's high school days in Hawaii. As the president's motorcade left the golf course at 3:58 p.m . We have had presidents who have not modeled that super well., We had a long basketball career together, Orme recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Eugene, Oregon. In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background--raised for a time in the Third World, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban politics--makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political system. . Whatever misgivings Obama had about Punahou, attending the school was largely his decision. A young black man struggles for acceptance at an institution of privilege, where he finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around him that he turns to alcohol and drugs. But Kakugawa, a convicted drug felon, said Saturday that he had never been the "prototypical angry black guy" that Obama portrays. He was loving and generous." Obama devotes many words in his book to exploring his outsider status at Punahou. "He challenged the coaches.. Still, Bendix said, his old pal should have been a starter at Punahou and insisted he was not just being loyal to an old friend. But we never talked race." When his mother, a woman said to have been born with a keen sense of wanderlust, announced she was returning to Indonesia, Obama, then a teenager, asked to stay in Hawaii, according to Soetoro-Ng, 36, who still lives in Honolulu. "He was very intelligent and witty. Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama's 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. "But he wanted to remain at Punahou. For the president to be able to be with a group where he can be absolutely relaxed a group that knows him from his youth on, and who he knows are friends with him not because of what he became, but because of who he is is a really comforting and warm thing, said David Axelrod, Mr. Obamas longtime strategist. Barack Obama, #23, during his senior year at Punahou School, Honolulu. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled. We all come from so many backgrounds, we have to get along., Obamas teammates for the most part are careful not to judge an old friend, even if his memories of racial attitudes at Punahou differ from their own. McLachlin said he told Obama he was volunteering for the American Heart Association and the president urged him to keep in touch. "If this story is eight paragraphs, seven of them go to Greg. "His friends called him `Negro,' " Darmawan said. Because hes a pastor, Maurer said he prefers not to weigh-in on politics. And when tempers flared, Barry was the peacemaker. "He would be very helpful with friends. They have a different level of affection for you than friends you meet later in life. The havoc time wreaks on fashion spares no one, not even the president of the United States.In a newly unearthed photo published Thursday in TIME magazine, a 17-year-old Barack Obama is seen wearing a white dinner jacket as he poses with friends on the night of their senior prom in Hawaii. And he frequently made peace--even allies--with the very people who angered him most. 'The sexual warmth is definitely there,' Cook wrote in her journal. On his senior yearbook page, he left behind these words: We go play hoop.. Most classmates and teachers recall an easygoing, slightly chunky young man, with the same infectious smile he sports today. When she told him she loved him, he responded with 'thank you', according to Maraniss, and they broke up in May 1985. They marked the 10th year of their rendezvous by looking through old photos, Mr. Ramos said, of when the kids were young and the dads had dark hair. And of course, he said, they all the president included reflected on the past year. That first year, Mr. Ramos said, I remember coming home from a golf outing and literally starting to cry, so emotional was the contrast he felt between their friendships and the transactional ones he said he had since formed as a businessman. 'When you're president, everybody wants something from you and only these types of friends are able to simply want your well-being. Maybe we could have helped him. With rain drizzling over Oahu, Obama's motorcade whisked Obama across the island to Titcomb's beachside home in Waialua, about an hour outside of Honolulu on the North Shore. Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. "They held his hands and feet and said, `One, two, three,' and threw him in the swamp," recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama wrote in "Dreams." The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii during Obama's Punahou days, was more reserved but seemed to love having her grandson's friends over to play and hang out. Barry did a good job but I think we needed a change," he said. Ann and the boy lived with the Dunhams in Honolulu until Obama was 6. ', In his memoir, 'Dreams From My Father,' Obama recalled a high school career that was, for the most part, ordinary 'marginal report cards and calls to the principal's office; part-time jobs at the burger chain; acne and driving tests and turbulent desire. For most of their high school years, Orme and Obama lived and loved basketball, even if their hours of practice never translated into much playing time on game day. I brood, Mr. Obamas friend Mr. Ramos said a few years ago. Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy. "He was built like a bull. So neither of us ever started and that was hard, he said. "You need to find Greg Orme," instructed Obama's old basketball coach, Chris McLachin. remembered Ati Kisjanto, 45. Journalistic excavations of a presidential candidates past often turn ugly. "He didn't say what country he wanted to be president of. She said a woman from People came to visit with her and then walked away with the Punahou reunion list and all its phone numbers. Mr. Titcomb was golfing with the president within hours of the Obamas Dec. 21 arrival on Oahu. Basketball was the great equalizer, he said. Aging photos show Obama and Orme decked out in 1970s fashion with their dates before attending a high school prom. Kelli Allman is the pretty redhead pictured in the photo. He was always very calm, very level-headed, very rational. It was hard to imagine that he felt that way, because he just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time, she said. He knew the really small apartment that Mr. Obama lived in with his grandparents and what a talker Gramps was. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull]." The havoc time wreaks on fashion spares no one, not even the president of the United States.In a newly unearthed photo published Thursday in TIME magazine, a 17-year-old Barack Obama is seen. Far less is known about Obama's buddies, of course, than about the president himself. But he took the high road and showed a lot of integrity. "We'd all do things together, but Obama was never there," Smith said, adding that they often brought along the few other black underclassmen. As much as he may have felt like an outsider at times, Obama rarely seemed to show it. They were. Like Mr. Obama, he was of mixed parentage the son of a Filipino father and a Czech mother and his parents were divorced. kscharnberg@tribune.com kbarker@tribune.com, Column: For the Chicago Blackhawks remodel to work, their new house had better be built on a strong foundation, Merrillville food and beverage tax edging closer to reality, Remains found in Rockdale more than 25 years ago identified as Aurora woman, Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information. So we'd get three kids together to fight him," recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. Greg? He would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. "He was just one of those perfect [ethnic] mixes of everything you see in Hawaii." The foursome, according to the Associated Press, teed off with another eight players.

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