Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

Madelyn Payne Dunham (born October 1922) is the maternal grandmother and only living full-blood relative of United States Senator and Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama. She raised Senator Obama from age 10 in her Honolulu, Hawaii high-rise apartment, where she still lives today.

Early Life

Madelyn Lee Payne was born in Augusta, Kansas, to "stern Methodist parents who did not believe in drinking, playing cards or dancing." She was one of the best students in the graduating class of 1940. But despite her parents' strict upbringing, she loved to go to Wichita, Kansas to hear the "big bands." . While in Wichita, Kansas, she met Barack Obama's grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham (born 1918) from the oil-town of El Dorado, Kansas and the "other side of the railroad tracks."

The Dunhams were Baptists. Unlike the Paynes, Stanley Dunham did not come from the white-collar crowd. Described by the Chicago Tribune as "gregarious, friendly, impetuous, challenging and loud," Stanley Dunham was a furniture salesman "who could charm the legs off a couch." Madelyn's parents did not approve of her marriage to Stanley Dunham on May 4, 1940..

After Pearl Harbor, Stanley Dunham enlisted in the Army, and Madelyn worked during World War II on a Boeing aircraft B-29 assembly line in Wichita. She gave birth to Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (who went by the name of Ann Dunham, despite being named "Stanley" after her father who wanted a boy), in Fort Leavenworth in November 1942.. With Madelyn and Stanley both working full-time and struggling, the family moved to California, Kansas, Texas, and Seattle, Washington (on Mercer Island), where Ann graduated high school. In El Dorado, Kansas, Stanley managed a furniture store while Madelyn worked in restaurants. In Seattle, Stanley worked in a bigger furniture store (Standard-Grunbaum Furniture) while Madelyn eventually became vice-president of a local bank. Mercer Island was then "a rural, idyllic place," quiet, politically conservative and all white. Madelyn and Stanley attended Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.

Madelyn and Stanley then moved to Hawaii (where Stanley found an even better furniture store opportunity). Ann attended the University of Hawaii and there met Senator Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama Senior, a graduate student from Kenya. Both Dunhams were upset when their daughter Ann married Barack Obama Senior, partcularly after receiving a long, angry letter from the graduate student's father in Kenya who "didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman." . But the Dunhams adapted. Madelyn Dunham was quoted as saying, “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.".

Raising Barack Obama

After the Obama marriage fell apart and young Barack Obama spent some years with his mother and her second husband in Indonesia, he returned to Hawaii at age 10 to live with his grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. At the time, Barack's mother Ann was an anthropologist employed on development projects in Indonesia and around the world helping women obtain microfinance. Leaving his mother was hard, but Barack preferred to stay in America with his grandparents than in Indonesia with his mother. Obama writes in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, "I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight.”.

In his book, Obama described his grandmother as "suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense." The Chicago Tribune called her "quiet but firm" (in contrast to Obama's "boisterous" grandfather Stanley). Obama considered his grandmother Madelyn "a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank." Madelyn Dunham took care of Barack's mother Ann in Hawaii in her last months before Ann died of cancer at age 53..

Stanley Dunham died in 1992 and is buried in the Punchbowl National Cemetery. Today Obama's grandmother continues to live in what CBS News has described as the same "non-descript highrise" in Honolulu, Hawaii where she raised Barack Obama (then known as "Barry"), with the same telephone number now as then.. Although Barack Obama's paternal step-grandmother Sarah Obama has given a number of recent interviews, Madelyn Dunham's last interview was in 2004, on the occasion of Barack Obama's keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I am not giving any interviews," Madelyn Dunham told a reporter who phoned in March 2008. "I am in poor health."