• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1037 0

their great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Clark, a Civil War veteran, then in his early eighties. The Armours had been teachers, Ralph Dunham said. But Mr. Armour, a lover of math and math puzzles, had discovered that he could make more money as an oil-field pumper, using his math skills to calculate the oil levels in tanks. He worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. A few years after Stanley and Ralph moved in, the Armours moved the family, minus Aunt Doris, to an oil lease eight miles from El Dorado by gravel road. Ralph, who said he inherited his interest in math and teaching from his grandparents, recalled life in the reconfigured family fondly. His grandmother, about forty years old when her daughter died, was young enough to be her grandsons’ mother—just as Madelyn would be when her grandson would first move in with her and Stanley in Honolulu in 1971. Doris Armour was young enough to be the boys’ sister. Stanley and Ralph developed a passion for games, particularly checkers, from their grandfather and great-grandfather. Many years later, when Stanley and Madelyn had become grand masters in duplicate bridge in Hawaii, he would want to play checkers on his occasional visits to Ralph’s home in Virginia. The last time they played, it was getting late, Ralph was tired, and Stanley had a flight to catch. Ralph suggested they quit, but Stanley was one game behind. “He insisted he wasn’t going to quit,” Ralph recalled. “So I really concentrated, and I beat him the next three games. Then he would go.”

Stanley was dark-haired and handsome, like his father. He matured earlier than Ralph and prided himself on his looks. At twenty-three years old, he was nearly six feet tall and weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds, according to his military records. The most striking feature on his large head was a powerful, elongated chin—which Stanley Ann would inherit and pass on to her son. In the head shots in the 1936 El Dorado High School annual, The Gusher, Stanley’s chin looks twice as long as anyone else’s. Thick black hair rolls back off his forehead in glistening waves. His mouth is compact. On occasion, he had a slightly quizzical tilt to his head—a familial trait I had first noticed one day while watching Stanley Ann in a video made a few years before her death. At that moment, I remembered seeing that tilt in Obama. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Ralph Dunham said of his great-nephew. “When he makes a speech, as Madelyn says, ‘He looks just like Stanley, only he’s black.’”

As a boy, Stanley did not fit the mold: That is the way Ralph put it. Ralph was the Boy Scout, the future scoutmaster who graduated at the top of his class at El Dorado Junior College. Stanley, a year and a half younger, was, Ralph said, “a Dennis the Menace type.” He liked to do unusual things, Ralph said, maybe because he wanted attention. At three years old, he ran away from home with the boy next door. He had a knack for getting into trouble. “He was a nonconformist, I’d say,” Ralph said. “He didn’t like to follow rules just because they were rules. He liked to have a reason for them. He liked to be a little bit daring.” For a teenager in small-town Kansas, Stanley was a flamboyant dresser. He struck some as a born salesman: He could strike up a conversation with almost anybody, it seemed. He was opinionated, occasionally even pompous and overbearing. He had a temper. “If people disagreed with him, he could be very unpleasant,” Ralph said. “He could make it very uncomfortable.” He was a great teller of stories, some of which appeared to be intended to demonstrate his worldliness and sophistication. He was not above embroidering his tales, even making a few up. Take the one about the time he and a friend bummed a ride from the president, Herbert Hoover. Hoover was visiting El Dorado while en route to the West Coast, and the whole town turned out to watch. The way Stanley and his friend told the story later, they skipped the parade and were walking down the highway when the president’s car stopped and picked them up. After they got settled, Stanley