greg orme obama's friend

And while they did enjoy marijuana, Mr. Ramos acknowledged, we played a lot more basketball than we smoked pot.. Titcomb, who golfed another two days with Obama this month before the others got into town, was a year behind Obama at Punahou. "His friends called him `Negro,' " Darmawan said. The Obamas attended a luau on Oahu's North Shore at the home of the president's childhood friend Bobby Titcomb, spending more than six hours at the gathering. Right around then, we really started getting into basketball., Obama was all business when it came to "the game. They agreed to rendezvous in Hawaii every year for the holidays, and their reunions became regular even as Mr. Obama was busy climbing to senator and president, a path none of them imagined nearly four decades ago and 5,000 miles from Washington. Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama's birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or Tongan. The Hawaii holidays became more and more appealing, he said in an interview just after he began his run for president. Now they mainly just golf more than 30 hours in six outings this vacation and trash-talk, just like in the old days. This is my man! a delighted Obama said, Maurer recalled. But generally, said the presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, It does seem like these presidents need to find a sanctuary whether its a place or a group of people where they can just be themselves and feel the connection from the present to the past. High school friends who predate adulthood and professional attainments often know each others siblings, parents, even grandparents and know each other in a way that later friends often cannot. 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. 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 2004 presidential campaign, both John F. Kerry and President Bush were embroiled in disputes over their Vietnam-era records, controversies that were stoked by the conflicting recollections of people who knew them. Allman said the two couples sipped Champagne before going to the dance, and then an after-party. He thanked "Tut and Gramps," his nicknames for Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, but didn't mention his faraway mother. Standing up for your buddies. Her date was Greg Orme, Obama's best friend. Like Obama, Topolinski had to straddle a racial divide. Increasingly, the reunions have become the focal point of Obama's family vacation in his second term as his teenage daughters spend less and less time at their father's side. Although the Choom Gang has come to define Mr. Obamas high school circle owing partly to the presidents memoir, Dreams From My Father, and a notation that Mr. Obama made in his senior yearbook thanking the group for good times Mr. Ramos said in an interview after leaving Oahu this week that the phrase does not describe their circle. A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine. Mr. Orme was unable to travel to Hawaii for the recent holiday, but the others called him twice. More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review of public records, show the arc of Obama's personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans. He was loving and generous." The first family has attended Titcomb's annual luaus in the past. Magazines, Digital What Obama and his companions talk about during their many hours alone is anyone's guess. He is unyielding in the things he believes in., I think hes done an unbelievable job as president, he said. After graduating in 1979, Maurer wound up at Stanford where he made the team as a walk on and found God. He has ethnic Chinese mother and his father was Polish. In Hawaii, our diversity defines us, it doesnt divide us, said Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a close friend of Obamas father in graduate school in the early 60s. "And we were told he had already moved away." 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. But Orme is a hard man to find. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an "ambush attack." Half the homes were old bamboo huts; half, including the Soetoro house, were nicer, with brick or concrete and red-tiled roofs. Obama and his date Megan Hughes, a student at the Hawaii School for Girls at La Pietra, joined Orme at Allmans house, where the two couples sipped champagne before going to the dance and then an after-party. Tucked away in someone elses shoe box of adolescent artifacts, there might be a picture of you in garish clothes and with an outdated do, your arm around a high school squeeze. Titcomb has worked as a commercial fisherman and an airline employee, according to the school's alumni magazine. But we never talked race." "We live in a world of bullies and the U.S. has been bullied around. "I don't imagine the decision to let him stay behind was an easy one for anyone," Soetoro-Ng said. 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. Among U.S. presidents, Obama is not alone in carving out time regularly to reconnect with his roots. 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. Now that life story is being edited by others. I don't see that we are producing many Thomas Jeffersons nowadays. Far less is known about Obama's buddies, of course, than about the president himself. Obama Hits Russia, the Gym and the Beach Thursday, Dec. 29 In 2011, he pleaded no contest to soliciting a prostitute, but Obama has stayed fiercely loyal to his childhood friend. 'Many people call Obama aloof, and he hasn't made a lot of friends in Washington,' Brinkley said. Murdaugh is heckled as he leaves court, Missing hiker buried under snow forces arm out to wave to helicopter, Incredible footage of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russians in Bakhmut, Fleet-footed cop chases an offender riding a scooter, Two Russian tanks annihilated with bombs by Ukrainian armed forces, Isabel Oakeshott clashes with Nick Robinson over Hancock texts, Dozens stuck in car park as staff refuses to open gate for woman, Insane moment river of rocks falls onto Malibu Canyon in CA. Since January, more than a dozen news organizations from around the globe, from the BBC to TV Asahi to People magazine, have dispatched reporters to Oahu. Among his supporters, his likability and credibility have only been boosted by his stories of being an outsider trying to fight his way in. WASHINGTON President Obama has called Hawaii his refuge, and so it has been throughout his political life. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Not many presidents retained friendships from as far back as high school, although George W. Bush had close friends from his prep school days at Andover. On prom night, the pair double-dated. Their. 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).'. Obama's motorcade left his Kailua vacation rental home at 10:48 a.m. under partly cloudy skies. He didnt have to see me, but he was a man of his word, he said. Their photos are more likely to be stored on Facebook than in a shoe box. But its fun to imagine that in one of those pictures, theres a girl in a pastel dress or a lanky guy in a white sport coat who will end up becoming the leader of the free world. Maurer, who played ball with Obama from the seventh grade through their senior year, said Julius Erving, better known as Dr. J, was their basketball hero. I get one, maybe.. Some, like Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, counted later acquaintances among political donors as friends. No such photos, no such article. Most classmates and teachers recall an easygoing, slightly chunky young man, with the same infectious smile he sports today. Known as Ann throughout her adult life, she kept to herself. Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called "Barry O'Bomber" by teammates. I guarantee he would have won a third term if he could have run again. Basketball was the great equalizer, he said. 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. These have been the stories told about the first two character-shaping decades of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's life, a story line largely shaped by his own best-selling memoir, political speeches and interviews. One of those friends, Neil Abercrombie, then a graduate student in the sociology department, frequently would see young Obama around town with his grandfather Stanley, whom Obama called "Gramps." He is undergoing what some have called the Profile Primary -- which is testing his ability to keep control of his public image, as journalists sketch portraits of the candidate as a young man and comb for contradictions and potential embarrassments in his past. She wistfully showed a reporter the love note Obama wrote in June 1979. In 2006, Mr. Obama used the family Christmas holiday there to decide whether to run for president. One of his incredible legacies will be how he modeled being a family man. He would carry his books in one hand and his ball in the other," he said. 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. The U.S. military was expanding on the island of Oahu, home to the new capital of Honolulu. He knew that." I really admire that.. He learned to adapt to unfamiliar territory. 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. "It's their world, all right," Ray supposedly shouts at Obama. He also liked to take outside shots and sometimes he got really hot.. Franklin D. Roosevelt made frequent trips back to Hyde Park, N.Y., throwing picnics or barbecues for former neighbors and friends, and George H.W. The term wasn't considered a slur at the time in Indonesia. Obama is playing golf with three of his friends, Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme. On Sunday evening, Titcomb hosted a barbecue at his beachfront home for the entire contingent from . The images from 1979 show a grinning 17-year-old Obama in a white suit with his arm around his date, Megan Hughes, before they headed to the party at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii. Here is how some of Obamas former teammates and coaches remember those years: To understand President Obama, you have to understand his Hawaiian roots, Maurer said. "But it wasn't a race thing," he said. You had three part-Hawaiians, one Filipino and me., But Hale said he is still enjoying the novelty of a famous classmate. "He would be very helpful with friends. They compose notes to friends and family and include photos or quotes that best represent them. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama "stands by his recollections of these events as related in his book." He showed leadership and caring for his teammates, McLachlin said. Obama, his mother and new baby sister, Maya, moved into a small apartment near the school's sprawling, lush campus. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result. They sought out parties, especially at the military bases on the island, where African-Americans would be in attendance. "But it was only playing." Meanwhile, the search continues for Obamas closest high school friends -- the self-proclaimed Basketball Jones, who raced around the island in Darin Maurers two-toned beige VW van with the band Earth, Wind and Fire blaring from the cassette deck. Obama admits in "Dreams" that during high school he frequently smoked marijuana, drank alcohol, even used cocaine occasionally. College would be his next stop. Others are more skeptical that the boy known as Barry felt the angst described by Barack. The president turns 53 on Monday. 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. I always knew he would do something, of course we never expected hed be in the White House, teammate and lifelong friend Greg Orme said. Barry would be the only black person. According to the book, the characters representing Orme and the other friend asked to leave the party after just an hour, saying they felt out of place. 21:01 GMT 31 Dec 2014. He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. Some of that crew has stayed in Hawaii, but others have moved off island. The race to track them down and coax them to open up likely will include reporters as well as opposition research experts for political rivals. They have a different level of affection for you than friends you meet later in life. I brood, Mr. Obamas friend Mr. Ramos said a few years ago. His partners matched Monday's team of Greg Orme, Darrell Harrington and Bobby Titcomb, and the foursome spent more than five hours on the course. He would have started on any other high school team on the state," McLachlin said of Obama. In his poem, An Old Man, there are glimpses of a tortured adolescent as well as a budding orator. The 1979 photo was snapped inside the home of former classmate, Kelli Allman, who was the prom date of the president's close high schoolfriend, Greg Orme. Corky Siemaszko is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital. Coaches have recalled how he never went anywhere without a ball. "One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school. Get-togethers in the decades after high school were rare as the men built careers and families, although Mr. Ramos, Mr. Titcomb and Mr. Orme attended the Obamas Chicago wedding in 1992. The reality was less tidy. By But one word Obama learned quickly in his new home was curang, which means "cheater." The Obamas did skip Hawaii in 2007 and instead the friends joined Mr. Obama in wintry Iowa for the January 2008 presidential caucuses. Basketball was a refuge, a place where I made a lot of my closest friends, and picked up a lot of my sense of competition and fair play, he said. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Greg? For a reputed loner, Mr. Obama has remained remarkably close to a trio he met as a teenager at Honolulus prestigious Punahou School boys of Hawaiis year-round summer with whom he played basketball, bodysurfed, drank beer and, like so many other young islanders in the 1970s, smoked pot, the choom of that long-ago nickname. The photos and interviews are in the new issue of TIME, which is out on Friday. By Cook, who was 25, and Obama, then 22, dated for 18 months, passing their time discussing books and cooking. Id put that up on e-Bay., Alan Lum, another teammate from the championship squad, who now teaches second grade at Punahou, has done enough interviews that his fellow teachers have started to rib him about his newfound fame. As a result, the handful of black students at Punahou informally banded together. You are extremely sweet and foxy, he wrote. "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. At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. "They own it and we in it. "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.. The foursome, according to the Associated Press, teed off with another eight players. The perfect tummy control bodysuit, a popcorn gadget, more bestsellers starting at $8. But the reality of Obama's narrative is not that simple. So just get the f--- outta my face." It was also how he wanted to be remembered. The reality was less tidy. Obama, however, was not a part of that group, according to Anthony and Smith. "If this story is eight paragraphs, seven of them go to Greg. A high school friend has shared photographs of Obama at his prom night withTIME magazine - as well as a very friendly note he penned in her yearbook, in which he calls her 'sweet and foxy'. In December 2006, as Mr. Obama decided on his first presidential campaign, the friends talked about how the race would complicate their next getaway. He was always very focused.. As you know, he made getting better health care for Americans one of his missions.. But we didnt really become good friends until the seventh grade. First Lady and her two daughters 'planning EXTENDED summer vacation at exclusive retreat', High school senior rejected by Kate Upton for prom asks Sports Illustrated model Nina Agdal instead - and she says YES, Report: Michelle Obama once dated inspector general at the center of IRS investigation into anti-tea party political favoritism, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S WOMEN: BARACK OBAMA'S FORMER FLAMES, Ukraine soldiers shoot down enemy drones with drones of their own, Mark Gordon arrives at Crawley Police Station after remains found, Pavement where disabled woman gestured at cyclist before fatal crash, Pro-Ukrainian drone lands on Russian spy planes exposing location, 'Buster is next!' One place Obama has said he found a sense of community was on the basketball court. IE 11 is not supported. Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school--this time a predominantly Muslim one--where he was enrolled. Obama and his mother joined her new husband, a kind man who later would become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer, family members in Indonesia say. Last year, a book delved into his teenage years and claimed that Obama and his friends formed The Choom Gang - slang for smoking marijuana - in which he invented inhaling techniques and rode a car called the Choomwagon. 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. Life without a father It was a complicated time. As he listened, McLachlin never dreamed that one day this determined young man, who had spent most of that season warming the bench while the Punahou High School varsity basketball team was marching on to win the Hawaii state championship, would grow up to be Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. After Obama's prom date with Megan Hughes and before settling down with Michelle during his time studying at Harvard, President Obama seriously dated two women: Alex McNear was a 20-year-old literature lover he met at Occidental College in 1981 before he transferred to Columbia in his junior year. In an interview with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black man. In its reissue after he gave the keynote address at the Democratic convention in 2004, "Dreams from My Father" joined a long tradition of political memoirs that candidates have used to introduce themselves to the American people. The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese. But such solitude has become less and less attainable for presidents in modern times. For me its the unconditional love, its the nontransactional nature of the relationship that enduring quality that is something that I really value, he said. 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. "It just wasn't a race thing," he reiterated again and again. Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most telling story. Hes kind of in and out. "He was very intelligent and witty. 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. He even scored a basket," he said. Yet many say they have trouble reconciling their nearly 30-year-old memories with Obamas more recent descriptions of himself as a brooding and sometimes angry adolescent, grappling with his mixed race and the void left by a father who gave him his black skin but little else. Throughout his youth, as depicted in his first book, he always found ways to meld into even the most uninviting of communities. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama. President Obama may have had a tough couple of weeks, but newly-released images will remind him of his more carefree days. Bush remained pals with men he served with in World War II. In a new introduction to the reissued edition of "Dreams," he noted that the dangers of writing an autobiography included "the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer [and] selective lapses of memory." "He's not like that." Mr. Ramos was a year ahead of Mr. Obama's Punahou class of '79, but played with him on the basketball. 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. McLachlin said he told Obama he was volunteering for the American Heart Association and the president urged him to keep in touch. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. Since returning to his childhood home this month on vacation, President Barack Obama has spent a good part of most days cloistered with three people whose company puts him at ease. "I brood," Mr. Obama's friend Mr. Ramos said a few years ago. (Photo by Joaquin Siopack-Pool/Getty Images) He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta. For Orme, the Obama he saw on the court was a lot like the Obama who occupied the White House a team player who liked to win. Sheriff: Cleveland man shot after attacking man with hatchet at Morgan County campground Mr. Obamas concern, Mr. Axelrod said, was for Mr. Titcomb, whose arrest was international news because he happened to be Barack Obamas friend.. So neither of us ever started and that was hard, he said. When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, "Curang, curang!" In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes. 14:27 GMT 23 May 2013 They divorced after seven years of marriage and have a daughter. In snapshots, the boy is a portrait of childhood bliss. 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. ", Every day after practice hed stay to play pickup games against the coaching staff," he said. His wife and daughters are skiing in Colorado. Their new neighborhood was only 3 miles to the west, but a world away. Hes off the grid, said Hale, who is now the schools head basketball coach. 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. Topolinski said neither he nor Obama were stars on their high school team. But Kakugawa, in the interview Saturday, said Obama's recollection of that conversation was mistaken. If young Obama had struggled to find a place at Punahou, it was well hidden on this day as well. He was always very calm, very level-headed, very rational.