The first African student at the University of Hawai'i, Barack Hussein Obama, reached Honolulu 11 months before Stanley Ann Dunham and her parents got there from Seattle. He was on the first airlift of Kenyan students brought to study at U.S. universities as part of a program organized by Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya and funded primarily by hundreds of American supporters.

At the time, there were no colleges in Kenya, which was in the last throes of British colonialism. His arrival in Honolulu was announced in a newspaper article under the headline "Young Men from Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H."

Obama told the reporter that he grew up on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, in East Africa, and was a member of the Luo tribe. He said he had worked as an office clerk in Nairobi for several years to save money for college and settled on UH "when he read in an American magazine about its racial tolerance."

Other accounts have said he went to Hawai'i because it was the only U.S. university to offer him a scholarship, but that appears unlikely, based on this contemporaneous report. In the newspaper story, Obama said he had enough money to stay in Hawai'i only for two semesters unless he applied for a scholarship.

He said he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy. He was concerned, he said, about his generation's disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with Westernization.

Taking a room at the Atherton branch of the YMCA, not far from campus, Obama adapted to the rhythms of student life. One of his frequent hangouts was the snack bar in an old Army-barracks-style building near his business classes. It was there that he met the Abercrombie brothers, first Neil and then Hal, who had escaped the darkness of Buffalo to attend graduate school in Honolulu, and their friends Peter Gilpin, Chet Gorman and Pake Zane.

They were intellectuals, experimenters, outsiders, somewhere between beatniks and hippies, and they loved to talk and drink coffee and beer. They were immediately taken by the one and only African student in their midst.

"He was very black, probably the blackest person I've ever met," recalled Zane, a Chinese-Hawaiian, who now runs an antiques shop a few miles from the university.

"Handsome in his own way," Zane said. "But the most impressive thing was his voice. His voice and his inflection — he had this Oxford accent. You heard a little Kenyan English, but more this British accent with this really deep, mellow voice that just resounded. If he said something in the room and the room was not real noisy, everybody stopped and turned around. I mean he just had this wonderful, wonderful voice. He was charismatic as a speaker."

It was not just the voice, said Neil Abercrombie, who is now the congressman for Hawai'i's First Congressional District, but Obama's entire persona — the lanky 6-foot-1 frame, the horn-rimmed glasses, the booming laugh, the pipe and an "incredibly vital personality."

"He was brilliant and opinionated and avuncular and opinionated. Always opinionated," Abercrombie said. "If you didn't know him, you might be put off by him. He never hesitated to tell you what he thought, whether the moment was politic or not. Even to the point sometimes where he might seem a bit discourteous. But his view was, well, if you're not smart enough to know what you're talking about and you're talking about it, then you don't deserve much in the way of mercy. He enjoyed the company of people who were equally as opinionated as he was."

Decades later, the snack bar crowd still pronounces the first name of their Kenyan friend "Bear-ick" — with the accent on the first syllable. That is how he referred to himself, they said. In Hawai'i at least, they never heard him call himself "Buh-rock," with the accent on the second syllable, the pronunciation his son would adopt in his adult life. Perhaps it was a minor accommodation to Westernization.

stereotypes all sides

A few months into Obama's first semester, another newspaper story about him focused on his conclusions about racial attitudes on the island. "No one seems to be conscious of color," he said.

But there were stereotypes to shatter on both sides — his of Hawai'i and Hawai'i's of Africa.

"When I first came here, I expected to find a lot of Hawaiians all dressed in native clothing and I expected native dancing and that sort of thing, but I was surprised to find such a mixture of races," he said.

When asked if people questioned him about Kenya, he laughed and said: "Oh, yes. People are very interested in the Mau Mau rebellion (an uprising against the British) and they ask about race relations in Kenya. I tell them they've improved since the rebellion but are not perfect. They also ask if Kenya is ready for self-government. Some others ask me such questions as how many wives each man has back home, what we eat, how I dress at home, how we live, whether we have cars."

Neither newspaper readers nor his fellow students knew that he had left a son and a pregnant wife back in Kenya.

Events in Africa intrigued Obama's fellow students and were part of the movable discussion, which often went from the university snack bar over to the Stardust Lounge or George's Inn, where pitchers of beer cost two bucks, and then on to Gilpin's apartment nearby. As they listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on the hi-fi, Obama spoke about Kenya and nationalism and colonialism and his fears about what might happen.

"He was very concerned that tribalism would trump nationalism," Neil Abercrombie said. "And that people like himself would not be properly recognized, would not be fully utilized, and there would be discrimination and prejudice. Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya's first post-colonial leader) was a Kikuyu, and Barack and Mboya were Luo, and Kikuyu were going to run things. We'd get into it that deeply."

Late in the summer of 1960, at the start of his second year and the beginning of her first, Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham met in a beginning Russian class. He was 25; she was not yet 18. She called him "Bear-ick," too. He called her Anna. Decades later, Ann would tell her son a story about their first date that he then depicted in his memoir "Dreams From My Father."

"He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. I got there and he hadn't arrived, but I figured I'd give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. An hour later, he showed up with a couple of friends. I woke up and three of them were standing over me and I heard him saying, serious as can be ... 'You see gentlemen, I told you she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.' "

Recounting the scene long after the fact, knowing how the relationship would end, the son was at his most lyrical.

"My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father's attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents' lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs, but it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that's how any love begins."

This was the prelude to the beginning of the second Barack Obama, the hapa, and in the narrative he creates about his mother, here, as always after, he writes with the sensibility not so much of a son as of an acute if sympathetic psychologist.

lied about divorce

During his time in Hawai'i, the elder 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. While the scene in the book includes two friends who were with him when he arrived late for a first date with Ann, few members of the snack bar crowd remember the Obama-Dunham relationship. Hal Abercrombie said he never saw them together. Zane, who left the island for a spell in 1961, could not recall Ann from those days but had precise memories of Obama.

Neil Abercrombie did remember her appearing at some of the weekend gatherings. Obama was such a strong personality, he said, that he could see how the young woman was awed and overwhelmed by him.

"She was a girl, and what I mean by that is she was only 17 and 18, just out of high school. And he brought her at different times. She mostly observed because she was a kid. Everybody there was pretty high-powered grad-student types."

Before the end of her first semester, Ann learned she was pregnant. The jolt that most parents might feel at such news from a teenage daughter was intensified for the Dunhams by the fact that the father was Obama. Madelyn Dunham has declined requests for interviews this year, but a few years ago she talked to the Chicago Tribune's David Mendell, who was researching his biography, "Obama: From Promise to Power."

Dunham, known for her practicality and skepticism in a family of dreamers, told Mendell that Stanley Ann had always been stubborn and nonconformist, and often did startling things, but none were more stubborn or surprising than her relationship with Obama.

When Mendell pressed her about Obama, she said she did not trust the stories the Kenyan told. Prodding further, the interviewer said that Obama had "a great deal of charm" and that his father had been a medicine man. "She raised her eyebrows and nodded to herself," Mendell wrote of Madelyn. "'He was ...' she said with a long pause, 'strange.' She lingered on the a to emphasize 'straaaaaange.'"

On Feb. 2, 1961, against Madelyn's hopes, and against the desires of Obama's father back in Kenya, Ann and Obama hopped a plane to Maui and got married. No guests, not even family members, were there. Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born six months later in Honolulu.

Ann dropped out of school to take care of him. Her husband finished his degree, graduating in June 1962, after three years in Hawai'i, as a Phi Beta Kappa straight-A student.

Then, before the month was out, he took off, leaving behind his still-teenage wife and child. He did not return for 10 years, and then only briefly.

leaves for mainland

A newspaper story on the day he left, June 22, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of Mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son.

Many years later, Barack Jr., then in high school, found a clipping of the article in a family stash of birth certificates and old vaccination forms. Why wasn't his name there, or his mother's? He wondered, he later wrote, "whether the omission caused a fight between my parents."

On his way east, Obama stopped in San Francisco and went to dinner at the Blue Fox in the financial district with Hal Abercrombie, who had moved to the city with his wife, Shirley. Abercrombie would never forget that dinner; he thought it showed the worst side of his old friend, a combination of anger and arrogance that frightened him.

Shirley was a blonde with a high bouffant hairdo, and when she showed up at the side of Hal and Barack, the maitre d' took them to the most obscure table in the restaurant. Obama interpreted this as a racial slight. When the waiter arrived, Obama tore into him, shouting that he was an important person on his way to Harvard and would not tolerate such treatment, Abercrombie recalled.

"He was berating the guy and condescending every time the waiter came to our table. There was a superiority and an arrogance about it that I didn't like."

In the family lore, Obama was accepted into graduate school at the New School in New York and at Harvard, and if he had chosen the New School there would have been enough scholarship money for his wife and son to come along. However, the story goes, he opted for Harvard because of the world-class academic credentials a Crimson degree would bring.

But there is an unresolved part of the story: Did Ann try to follow him to Cambridge? Her friends from Mercer Island were left with that impression. Susan Botkin, Maxine Box and John W. Hunt all remember Ann showing up in Seattle late that summer with little Barry, as her son was called.

"She was on her way from her mother's house to Boston to be with her husband," Botkin recalled. "(She said) he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him. And I was intrigued with who she was and what she was doing. Stanley was an intense person ... but I remember that afternoon, sitting in my mother's living room, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies. She had her baby and was talking about her husband, and what life held in store for her. She seemed so confident and self-assured and relaxed. She was leaving the next day to fly on to Boston."

But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawai'i.

Tomorrow: Part III, mother's character shapes her son