Punahou School teacher Mabel Hefty stood before her fifth-grade students — a Hawaiian rainbow of 10-year-old boys and girls with Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, African, Korean, Tongan, American and multiracial parentage — in the fall of 1971 and insisted that any one of them could grow up to be president of the United States.
“Miss Hefty was talking to all of us, but she was looking straight at Barry,” Dean Ando said Wednesday.
Dean grew up to become a delegate at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Barry grew up to become the nominee for president at the Denver convention.
Punahou was founded in Honolulu in 1841 by Christian missionaries to educate their American-born children, and 130 years later, the private academy had mushroomed to 44 buildings on 76 acres in the Manoa Valley.
“There was a new kid in home room that stood out. He was taller than everyone else. He had come from Indonesia. He was black. And he seemed a little more worldly.”
Barry was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother who met in college. However, they divorced; his mother met another man, and they moved to Indonesia. In 1971 she sent her son back to Honolulu to live with her parents and enroll at Punahou.
“He was a soccer and tennis player, but basketball was all the rage in Hawaii then, and we taught him to play the game. He taught us about jazz. We became great friends,” Dean says. “I always knew there was something special about Barry. He didn’t have the best grades in school, but he was the most intellectual. And he sure could play basketball and body-surf. I didn’t know whether he’d be a brain or an athlete.”
Dean and Barry graduated with 409 others in 1979, and they went off to different California colleges and in different determined directions.
“He wasn’t political then, but I always had been because of my father (a member of the state board of education). I lost touch with Barry, but one day I was reading a story in The Wall Street Journal about the first African-American who had been named editor of the Harvard Law Review. That was my old friend Barry.”
Barack Obama.
Ando wound up in Tacoma, Wash., and became involved in grassroots politics. He kept up with Obama — the state legislator, the Democratic convention speaker, the Illinois senator — “and I thought he might run for president in 2016, and I’d retire and join his campaign. I never thought it would be 2008 instead, and here we are.”
Dean is attending his first Democratic convention and “having an amazing experience in Denver,” and his signature is among the chosen 306 on the Obama nomination. The business cards he’s handing out at the arena state “Dean Ando, Barack’s High School Classmate.”
Tonight, Dean will flash the memories of room 307 in Castle Hall at Punahou School, where he met a boy named Barry, and they heard the encouragement from the late Miss Hefty (who had taught previously in Kenya and has been mentioned specifically by Obama as his most influential teacher), and he will think about when the two boys played basketball on the playground on weekends, how they studied history together and are a part of history now.
“Then,” Dean says, “I just want to listen to Barry and feel the energy.”
Of the Hawaiian rainbow that was and the Colorado kaleidoscope that is.
