A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [25]
Stanley and Madelyn’s marriage was stormy. He could be opinionated and stubborn, and had what Obama described years later as a violent temper. He did not like losing arguments and was not in the habit of agreeing to disagree. It was not unknown for him and Madelyn to ruin a family holiday by waging a protracted argument over a period of hours in the presence of out-of-town relatives. Ralph Dunham told me his brother dropped out of UC Berkeley because of a language requirement, but others said Madelyn complained that she had ended up writing too many of Stanley’s term papers while he sprawled on the couch, reading murder mysteries. She pulled the plug on Berkeley, it was said, and he did not forgive her for insisting they return to Kansas. “What can you do if your wife won’t support you to get an education?” he complained more than once. In the summer of 1957, Madelyn’s parents, her aunt Ruth, and her younger brother, Jon, stopped in Seattle on their annual summer road trip. Jon, a few years older than Stanley Ann and more like a cousin than an uncle, had left the University of Kansas and was scheduled to report to the Air Force the following February. He found a job selling menswear at a department store in Seattle and spent four months sleeping on the Dunhams’ couch. To him, Madelyn and Stanley’s marriage at that time looked shaky. There was loud arguing, not infrequently about money. Stanley Ann would sometimes bolt from the apartment or shut herself in her room. “I think she maybe just didn’t want to hear it,” Jon Payne told me. Stanley Ann reached the conclusion early on, Kathy Powell Sullivan said, that her parents’ marriage was not a model she intended to follow.
Mercer Island was politically conservative but not extreme. In the spring of 1955, a year before the Dunhams moved to Mercer Island, John Stenhouse, a member of the school board and the father of Iona Stenhouse, who would become Stanley Ann’s classmate, was subpoenaed to testify before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communist activity in the Seattle area. Born in China and educated in England, he said he had attended a handful of Communist Party discussion-group meetings in Los Angeles in 1943 and in Washington, D.C., in 1946 but had had no contact with the party since. He had moved to Mercer Island in 1949 and joined the school board in 1951. He worked for an insurance company in Seattle and, with his wife, was active in helping to reclaim land on Mercer Island for parks and in working to establish a health cooperative. That spring, school boards in Bremerton and Tacoma were firing teachers who took the Fifth Amendment when called before the subcommittee, and the state legislature made Communist Party membership a crime. On the Stenhouse case, Mercer Island was split. Marilyn Bauer, a close friend of Iona’s, told me that her own father was constantly saying, half teasingly, “We’re not having the communist over, are we?” Iona Stenhouse, however, recalled feeling sheltered and protected by the community—spirited away to the beach club by family friends, for example, when reporters or lawyers were at her parents’ house. In March, two hundred people turned out for a school board meeting to consider Stenhouse’s fate. After a two-hour hearing, the board left the decision to Stenhouse, who decided not to step down. To Jim Wichterman, arriving not long afterward to teach at the high school, the island’s handling of John Stenhouse reflected a fundamental sense of proportion and balance that Wichterman believed prevailed at that time on Mercer Island.
The