Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. ~ Born August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.

Today is President Obama's 52nd birthday. Despite absurd claims by the so-called "Birthers," there is more than sufficient documentation that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Barack Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, to Stanley Ann Dunham, an American of mainly English descent from Wichita, Kansas, and Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya.

Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married on February 2, 1961, and Barack was born later that year. His parents separated when he was two years old and they divorced in 1964. Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.

Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th and current President of the United States. The first African American to hold the office, he served as the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.

Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.

Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for United States Senate in 2004. His victory, from a crowded field, in the March 2004 Democratic primary raised his visibility. His prime-time televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 made him a rising star nationally in the Democratic Party. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 by the largest margin in Illinois history.

He began his run for the presidency in February 2007. After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination, becoming the first major party African American candidate for president. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.

Image & Text:wikipedia.com

Hawaiian Coffee Mug

Last Saturday I went to the Fall Picnic at the Bohemian Grove with my friend Adam K, whose birthday is coming up the end of next week. He’s going to celebrate it with a short trip to Hawaii. We spent a few days there together this past February. John Renke, the founder of Schola Cantorum San Francisco (about which I’ll write much more later) is now the organist and choir director at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral in Honolulu. John is one of the few people I know who will probably never get “Island Fever.” That’s because he’s so busy with his various music programs.

I just had my morning coffee in one of my most prized possessions – a touristy Hawaiian coffee mug – with shadowed palm trees at sunset. It was given to me by Mattie Tolbert, a member of my team about ten years ago. Mattie had been a contractor before becoming a regular Customs aide when we were still the U.S. Customs Service as part of Treasury.

Mattie was very sick. I didn’t realize how much until much later. I didn’t know exactly what her illness was, but I knew she had some kind of treatment every week. Besides the scheduled sick leave for her appointments, she hardly ever took a day off work.

Mattie had a teenage daughter in high school, and she was the joy of Mattie’s life. As soon as Mattie had worked three years at Customs and had acquired career status with full benefits, she took an extended weekend trip to Hawaii to celebrate her birthday. She was gone from work only two days. On her return she gave me the coffee mug. The next day she called in sick --the first time that I could remember. She then was hospitalized. I think she died only a few days later. Mattie had had cancer and had been sick for several years. But she was determined to leave something for her daughter and had struggled to survive until she had reached the threshold for career status. She had timed it almost to the day.

Most of the Entry Branch went to Mattie’s funeral in the East Bay. It was an open casket. I recall that Mattie had a serene, beatific, and most satisfied expression on her face.