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By Root 945 0

Stanley Ann, in a retirement community in Springfield, Virginia, where he was living with his wife, Betty. Stanley Dunham had been dead for sixteen years, so I had turned to Ralph, his only sibling, for help. Ralph, whose full name is Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, told me that his grandfather, who had studied at Kansas State University to become a pharmacist, had been an admirer of Emerson. So he named his son Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, who in turn passed the name on to his eldest son. Ralph told me that his mother admired Henry Morton Stanley, the journalist and explorer who found David Livingstone beside Lake Tanganyika in 1871. So she named her second son Stanley. Ralph, a year and a half older than Stanley, was the more studious and less flamboyant of the two Dunham brothers. He graduated from El Dorado High School in 1934, intending to become a teacher. He majored in math at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia and got a Ph.D. in educational psychology from UC Berkeley in 1950. He taught in colleges in the South, then worked for the U.S. Naval Personnel Research Activity, doing training and qualifications for the Polaris program, then the Federal Aviation Agency, then the Office of Education, which later became the Department of Education. He served as a lieutenant in the Army during World War II and was in Normandy and the Rhineland after D-Day, remained in the Reserve afterward, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. While being trained in rapid fire with an Enfield, he stunned the sergeant by firing his two clips of ammunition in about thirty-five seconds and hitting the bull’s-eye every time. At age seven, he had learned from his father how to fire a single-shot, bolt-action .22 rifle.

The dark secret in the Dunham boys’ childhood involved a hunting trip with their father. The elder Ralph Dunham, born in Argonia, Kansas, in 1894, had arrived in Wichita at age twenty and married Ruth Lucille Armour the following year. According to their marriage license, filed with the probate court in Sedgwick County in October 1915, Ruth was eighteen. But her gravestone at Sunset Lawns Cemetery in El Dorado, where she was buried eleven years later, gives the year of her birth as 1900. If the gravestone is correct, she was no more than sixteen when she married. Her eldest son, Ralph, was born in 1916; Stanley followed a year and a half later in 1918. Their father was dashing, it was said in the family. His occupational history suggests he was restless. In a military registration card filled out in June 1917, he described himself as a self-employed café owner in Wichita. In 1923, he was listed in the El Dorado city directory as working in sales at the El Dorado Garage. A few years after that, he owned an automobile dealership, repair shop, and garage in Topeka. When that failed, he ran a drugstore in Wichita with his parents. His obituary in The Wichita Eagle in 1970 described him as a retired Boeing Company employee. It was a pattern not unlike the one that his younger son, Stanley, would follow some years later. Perhaps it was a distant antecedent to the wanderlust that Maya Soetoro-Ng would one day say she inherited from her adventurous mother, Stanley Ann.

On Thanksgiving in 1926, the young Dunham family, Ralph and Ruth Dunham and their two boys, traveled from their home in Topeka to Melvern to hunt and spend the holiday with a sister and brother of Ralph Sr.’s. A detailed account of the day appeared on the front page of The Topeka State Journal the following afternoon. Ralph Sr. and Ruth had “a disagreement” after arriving in Melvern, the article stated. When Ralph Sr. and his brother left the house with the boys to go hunting, Ruth Dunham, the boys’ mother, departed for Topeka. She made her way to a drugstore near the Dunhams’ home and near her husband’s garage. She told the owner, George W. Lawrence, that a dog had been run over by a car and that she wanted to buy something to kill it. “Lawrence recommended chloroform,” the newspaper reported. “Mrs. Dunham said that she didn’t want that, as the smell of chloroform made