Obama Attends Service for Grandmother
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; Page A03
HONOLULU, Dec. 23 — President-elect Barack Obama and his family joined close friends Tuesday to pay tribute to the woman he called his “rock,” his maternal grandmother, who provided stability in his young life and made possible his rise to the nation’s presidency.
The Obamas attended a private memorial service for Madelyn Dunham, who lived in a modest apartment here and died of cancer at age 86 two days before the presidential election.
The service was held at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, a two-story house converted into a place of worship. The service was closed to the media.
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu is where the funeral for President Obama’s grandparents and mother were held. It was here he attended Sunday School as a boy.
When Obama was in elementary school in Honolulu, Young recounted in a telephone phone interview, either his grandmother or grandfather (there’s confusion over which one) brought him to Sunday school there for several years.
The Dunhams had attended a Unitarian church in the Seattle area when Obama’s mother was a teenager. Although there’s no record of their attendance at the Honolulu church, Obama writes about it in his memoir “Dreams From My Father,” and one family who still attends the church remembers him.
When Young reminded Obama at the memorial service, “his eyes lit up, and he turned to Michelle and said, ‘Hey, that’s right. This is where I went to Sunday school.’”
Obama spent some time on the second floor, where Sunday school is held, but didn’t recognize anything. That’s not surprising, Young said, because the church has been renovated over the years.
The 100-year-old building had been an estate of the Cooks, a well-known family in Hawaii.
