A Boy Named Stanley
Summary of eRumor:
This is a forwarded email about the grandfather and mother of President Barack Obama. It alleges that the President’s grandfather was a troubled youth after the suicide of his mother and says he was a drifter. This eRumor also alleges that President Obama “is the product of generations of severe psychological dysfunction.”
Some versions of this eRumor contain naked photos of a woman alleged to be Stanley Ann Dunham.
The Truth:
Note: Different versions of this eRumor have been circulating the Internet, some of them in very poor taste with photos of a naked woman alleged to be the mother of President Barack Obama. TruthOrFiction.com has removed the photos from our example of the eRumor and we will not be addressing that portion of the rumor, mainly because they are in poor taste and disrespectful to the office of the President of the United States.
Below are some of the historical facts of the grandfather and mother of President Barack Obama from a variety of sources. We have linked them to our findings and we will continue to add to this page as more is revealed to us:
Stanley Armour Dunham was born in Wichita, Kansas on March 23, 1918 and was the maternal grandfather of President Barack Obama.
According to “The Riddle of Barack Obama: A Psychobiography” by Avner Falk, Dunham suffered a traumatic loss when his mother, Ruth Lucille Armour, committed suicide on November 25, 1926. She was 26 and suffered from depression because to strife and conflict in her marriage to Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, who the author called a womanizer. At that time Stanley Dunham was 8 years old. After the death of Ruth, Ralph “regressed emotionally and abandoned his family,” leaving Stanley and his brother, Ralph Jr., in the care of their strict Christian maternal grand parents.
TruthOrFiction.Com believes that much of the allegations of this eRumor may have stemmed from Falk’s book.
According to “Dreams of my Father,” by Barack Obama by the age of 15, his future “Gramps” was kicked out of high school “for punching the principle in the nose.” Obama wrote that the following three years of his grandfather’s life was spent doing odd jobs, hopping rail cars a number of times, “dabbling in moonshine, cards and women.” He eventually ended up in Wichita where he met Madelyn Lee Payne and they were secretly married on the night of her school prom on May 5, 1940. Payne’s parent disapproved of Dunham.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, Stanley Dunham enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private and was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, a little over 200 miles north west of Wichita. He was not deployed to Europe until 1943. Madelyn remained in Wichita where she worked at a Boeing aircraft assembly plant.
Stanley Dunham eventually climbed up the ranks to sergeant and his unit helped to supply the Ninth Air Force in the D-Day mission on June 6, 1944. He was eventually deployed to England but his role in the war never saw combat.
According to a June 1, 2009 article by the Associated Press, “Stanley Dunham’s military personnel file was destroyed, along with millions of others, in a 1973 fire at the Military Personnel Records center in St. Louis.”
Two years after their secret wedding, on November 29, 1942 they had a daughter whom they named Stanley Ann Dunham. In the “Dreams of my Father”, Obama wrote, that the name choice was “one of Gramps’ less judicious ideas — he had wanted a son.”
Tired of all the ridicule and endless explanations of being named after her father Stanley Ann Dunham began introducing herself as Ann by the time she was in her teens.
After the war he moved the family to California where he attended the University of California at Berkley on the G.I. Bill. Obama wrote in his autobiography, “But the classroom couldn’t contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed long enough for my mother to finish high school.”
In 1960 the Dunham family moved to Hawaii and Stanley Ann Dunham enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where she studied Anthropology.
In 1961, at the age of 17, she met a foreign student from Kenya, Barack Obama, age 25, in a Russian language class. According to her page on the Biography.com website, she “married him after she became pregnant. They later divorced and she cared for her son while juggling a full college course load.” Six months after a quiet wedding, Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was in Honolulu.
The marriage did not meet the approval of the Dunham family or Obama’s father in Kenya and ended because Obama lied about his marital status. This according to a August 22, 2008 article by the Washington Post that said, “Obama seemed adept at walling off various aspects of his life. He eventually told Ann about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced, which she would discover years later was a lie.” The article said that Ann’s mother called her “stubborn and nonconformist,” and that her daughter “often did startling things, but none were more stubborn or surprising than her relationship with Obama.”
The article went on to say that the senior Obama finished his degree and graduated in June 1962. “Then, before the month was out, he took off, leaving behind his still-teenage wife and namesake child. He did not return for 10 years, and then only briefly.”
After the birth of her son, Ann left her studies to care for her baby. Around 1967, Ann returned to the University of Hawaii and got a degree in Mathematics. Meanwhile, across the Pacific and on the other side of the mainland Barack Obama Sr. was completing his studies at Harvard. By now the divorce was final and the Washington Post reported that she had met and married another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro. Ann and Barack Jr., who about this time got the nick name of Barry, moved with him to his home country, Indonesia.
Sometime in1969, the Soetoro’s hired a nanny named Evie. According to a March 8, 2012 article by the New York Daily News, Evie “was born male but considers herself a woman.” The article said, “Evie started caring for 8-year-old ‘Barry’ Obama in 1969 when he lived in Indonesia’s capital with his mother, Ann Dunham, who had arrived in the country two years earlier after marrying her second husband, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro.” The article went on to say that,” Evie played with Obama and picked him up from school. She worked in the home as a man and says she never let young Barry see her in women’s clothes, though neighbors remember seeing her leave the home in the evening dressed in drag.”
Posted 02/21/14