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Hardcover 1978 Oahuan yearbook from Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, 9 x 12.25, 327 pages, signed and inscribed inside on an athletics page in pencil, "Lyle, I'm sorry you can't sign mine, cause you were a good buddy in Chem. this year. You are so smart at Chem! Thanks for helping me in labs, God will reward you. Have a choice summer. I await readings about your chem. work in years to come. Friends, Barry." Obama is pictured twice in the yearbook: as part of Mr. Kusinoki's junior class (p. 68) and as a member of the varsity basketball team (p. 163).
The book is filled with inscriptions from fellow classmates, with others also referencing Lyle's prowess in the laboratory (Dawna writes: "I'd really like to thank you for spilling hydrochloric acid on me and for getting my hands spotted with silver nitrate…Really, I want to thank you for all of your help in chem"). In very good condition, with cracked hinges and rubbing to boards.
By 1978, Barack Obama was nearing the end of his years at Punahou School in Honolulu, where he had enrolled in the fifth grade after returning to Hawaii from several childhood years in Indonesia. Living largely with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, Obama came of age in a setting that he would later describe as formative to his developing sense of identity. At Punahou, one of Hawaii’s most prominent private schools, he was known as “Barry,” played basketball, and was beginning to grapple with questions of race, belonging, ambition, and his place within the wider world—experiences he later explored at length in his memoir Dreams from My Father.
Written at the close of his junior year, this unusually substantial inscription captures Obama well before the beginnings of his political career, in the familiar voice of a 16-year-old writing to a friend and chemistry classmate. Its references to laboratory work, summer plans, and friendship provide an intimate snapshot of Obama’s adolescence during a formative period in Honolulu—more than three decades before his election as the 44th president of the United States.
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