On weekday mornings as a teenager, Barry Obama left his grandparents' apartment on the 10th floor of the 12-story high-rise at 1617 S. Beretania, and walked up Punahou Street.

Before crossing the overpass above the H-1 Freeway, he passed Kapi'olani Medical Center, walking below the hospital room where he was born on Aug. 4, 1961.

Two blocks farther along, at the intersection with Wilder, he could look left toward the small apartment on Poki Street where he had spent a few years with his little sister, Maya, and his mother, Ann, back when she was getting her master's degree at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa before she left again for Indonesia.

Soon enough he was at the lower edge of Punahou School, where he studied some and played basketball more.

An adolescent life told in five Honolulu blocks, confined and compact, but far, far away from Washington, D.C. Apart from other unprecedented aspects of his rise, it is a geographical truth that no politician in American history has traveled farther than Barack Obama to be within reach of the White House. He was born and spent most of his formative years on O'ahu.

As the son of a white woman and a black man, he grew up as a multiracial kid, "hapa" in the local lexicon, in one of the most multiracial places in the world, with no majority group. There were Hawaiians, Japanese, Filipinos, Samoans, Okinawans, Chinese and Portuguese, along with Caucasians, commonly known as haole, and a smaller population of blacks, mostly centered at the U.S. military installations.

But diversity does not automatically translate to social comfort: Hawai'i has its own history of racial and cultural stratification, and young Obama struggled to find his place even in that many-hued milieu.

He had to leave the Islands to find himself as a black man, eventually rooting in Chicago, the antipode of Honolulu, and there setting out on the path that led toward politics. Yet, in essence it is the promise of the place he left behind — the notion if not the reality of Hawai'i, what some call the spirit of aloha, the transracial if not post-racial message — that has made his rise possible. Hawai'i and Chicago are the two main threads weaving through the cloth of Barack Obama's life. Each involves more than geography.

HAWAI'I VS. CHICAGO

Hawai'i is about the forces that shaped him, and Chicago is about how he reshaped himself. Chicago is about the critical choices he made as an adult: how he learned to survive in the rough-and-tumble of law and politics, how he figured out the secrets of power in a world defined by it, and how he resolved his inner conflicts and refined the subtle, coolly ambitious persona now on view in the presidential election. Hawai'i comes first. It is what lies beneath, what makes Chicago possible and understandable.

Hawai'i involves the struggles of a teenage hapa at Punahou who wanted nothing more than to be a pro basketball player. It is about his extraordinary mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, deeply loving if frequently absent. While politicians burnish their histories by laying claim to early years of community work and lives of public service, she was the real deal, devoting her career, unsung and underpaid, to helping poor women make their way in the modern world.

It is about his father, Barack Hussein Obama, an imperious if alluring voice gone distant and then missing. It is about his grandparents, Madelyn and Stan Dunham, Toot and Gramps, the white couple with whom he lived for most of his teenage years, she practical and determined, he impulsive, hokey, well-intentioned and, by his grandson's account, burdened with the lost hopes of a Willy Loman-style salesman. It is about their family's migration away from the Great Plains to the West Coast to Hawai'i.

And that was not far enough for their daughter, who went farther, to Indonesia, and traveled the world until, at the too-early age of 52, she made her way back to Honolulu, taking an apartment next to her parents' in the high-rise on the corner of Beretania and Punahou, to die there of cancer.

It was the same year, 1995, that her son made his debut on the national stage with a book about himself that searched for the missing, the void — his dad, Kenya, Africa — and paid less attention to the people and things that had shaped his life, especially his mother.

The simple fact is that he would not exist as a human being, let alone as a politician, without his mother's sensibility, naive or adventurous, or both. Of all the relationships in Obama's life, none has been deeper, more complex or more important.

They lived under the same roof for only perhaps 12 years and were frequently apart during his adolescence, but her lessons and judgments were always with him. In some sense, because they were just 18 years apart, they grew up together.

Like many presidential aspirants before him, and perhaps most like Bill Clinton, Obama grew up surrounded by strong women, the male figures either weak or absent. Once, during the heat of the primary race between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a claim came from Bill Clinton that he "understood" Obama. As different as their backgrounds and families were, it was perhaps this strong-female, weak-male similarity that he had in mind.

A GIRL NAMED STANLEY

Who was Obama's mother? The shorthand version of the story has a woman from Kansas marrying a man from Kenya, but while Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Wichita in the fall of 1942, it is a stretch to call her a Jayhawk. After leaving Kansas when she was a youngster, she and her parents lived in Berkeley, Calif., for two years; Ponca City, Okla., for two years; and Wichita Falls, Texas, for three years before they ventured to the Seattle area.

They arrived in time for her to enter ninth grade at the new high school on Mercer Island, a hilly slab of land in Lake Washington that was popping with tract developments during the Western boom of the postwar 1950s. The island is not much more isolated than Staten Island on the other side of the country. Just east of Seattle, it is connected to the city by what was then called the floating bridge.

Stan was in the furniture trade, a salesman always looking for the next best deal, and the middle-class suburbs of Seattle offered fertile territory: All the new houses going up would need new living room and dining room sets. He took a job in a furniture store in Seattle.

Madelyn, who brought home a paycheck most of her life, found a job in a banking real estate escrow office, and the family settled into a two-bedroom place in a quiet corner of the Shorewood Apartments, nestled near the lake shore in view of the Cascade Mountains. Many islanders lived there temporarily as they waited for new houses to be finished nearby. But the Dunhams never looked for another home, and they filled their high-ceilinged apartment with the Danish modern furniture of that era.

Stanley Ann was an only child, and in those days she dealt head-on with her uncommon first name. No sense trying to hide it, even though she hated it.

"My name is Stanley," she would say. "My father wanted a boy, and that's that."

Her mother softened it, calling her Stanny or Stanny Ann, but at school she was Stanley, straight up.

"She owned the name," recalled Susan Botkin, one of her first pals on Mercer Island. "Only once or twice was she teased. She had a sharp tongue, a deep wit, and she could kill. We all called her Stanley."

In a high school culture of brawn and beauty, Stanley was one of the brains. Often struggling with her weight, and wearing braces her junior year, she had the normal teenage anxieties, according to her friends, though she seemed less concerned with superficial appearances than many of her peers were. Her protective armor included a prolific vocabulary, free from the trite and cliched; a quick take on people and events; and biting sarcasm.

John Hunt said those traits allowed Stanley to become accepted by the predominantly male intellectual crowd, even though she had a soft voice.

"She wasn't a shouter, but sat and thought awhile before she put forth her ideas. She was one of the most intelligent girls in our class, but unusual in that she thought things through more than anyone else," Hunt said.

Stanley would use her wit not to bully people, her classmates recalled, but rather to slice up prejudice or pomposity. Her signature expression of disdain was an exaggerated rolling of her brown eyes.

Susan Botkin thought back to late afternoons when she and Stanley would go downtown to the Seattle library and then hitch a ride home with Stan and Madelyn.

"We would climb into the car, and immediately he would start into his routine," she recalled. In the back seat, the daughter would be rolling her eyes, while in the front, Madelyn — "a porcelain-doll kind of woman, with pale, wonderful skin, red hair, carefully coiffed, and lacquered nails" — would try to temper her husband with occasional interjections of "Now, Stan ... "

Another high school friend, Maxine Box, remembered that they enjoyed getting rides in the old man's white convertible and that he was always ready and willing to drive them anywhere, wanting to be the life of the party.

"Stanley would gladly take the transportation from him," Box said, but would "just as soon that he go away. They had locked horns a lot of times." The mother, she sensed, was "a buffer between Stan and Stanley."

Stanley and her friends would escape across the bridge into Seattle, where they hung out at a small espresso cafe near the University of Washington. Anything, Hunt said, to "get away from the suburban view. We would go to this cafe and talk and talk and talk" — about world events, French cinema, the meaning of life, the existence of God.

Their curiosity was encouraged by the teachers at Mercer Island High, especially Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who taught advanced humanities courses open to the top 25 students. The assigned reading included not only Plato and Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also late-1950s critiques of societal conventions, such as "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte, "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman and "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, as well as the political theories of Hegel and Mill and Marx.

"The Communist Manifesto" was also on the reading list, and it drew protests from some parents, prompting what Wichterman later called "Mothers Marches" on the school — a phrase that conjures up a larger backlash than really occurred but conveys some of the tension of the times.

"They would come up in ones and twos and threes and berate the teacher or complain to the principal," Hunt recalled.

Wichterman and Foubert, said Chip Wall, were "instrumental in getting us to think, and anybody who tries to do that, particularly in high school, has trouble. 'Make my kid a thinker, but make sure he thinks like I do.' "

HIS MOTHER'S SON

In tracking the Obama story this year, some conservative Web sites have seized on the high school curriculum of his mother as evidence of an early leftist indoctrination. Wall, who has spent his life challenging dogma from any ideology, answered this interpretation with a two-word dismissal: "Oh, crap."

Stanley challenged the existence of God and championed Adlai Stevenson. But while some of her friends turned toward cynicism, she did not.

"She was intrigued by what was happening in the world and embraced change," Susan Botkin recalled. "During our senior year, the Doomsday Clock seemed as close as it had ever been to boom. And the thought affected people in our class. There was a sense of malaise that permeated the group: Why bother? The boom is going to happen. But Stanley was better able to laugh it off, to look beyond it. Come out of that bomb shelter and do something."

Their senior class graduated in June 1960, at the dawn of the new decade. A few days after commencement, Stanley left for Honolulu with her parents.

Decades later she told her son that she had wanted to go to the University of Chicago, where she had been accepted, but that her father would not let her be that far from them, since she was barely 17.

Her friends from Mercer Island recalled that, like many of them, she intended to stay in Seattle and go to "U-Dub," the University of Washington, but that again her father insisted that she was too young even for that and had to accompany them to Hawai'i.

That was nearly 50 years ago. Time compresses, and the high school classmates of Stanley Ann Dunham now have an unusual vantage point from which to witness the presidential campaign of her son. "You see so much of her in his face," Maxine Box said. "And he has his grandfather's long chin."

In watching Obama speak and answer questions, Chip Wall could "instantly go back and recognize the person" he knew decades ago. Stanley is there, he said, in the workings of the son's mind, "especially in his wry sense of speech pattern."

SURPRISING TRANSITION

The fact that her son is black was surprising but not out of character; she was untouched by racial prejudice.

The hardest thing for them to grasp was that Barack Obama Jr. came into being only a little more than a year after Stanley left Mercer Island. She seemed like such an unlikely candidate for teenage motherhood, not just because of her scholarly ways and lack of boyfriends, but because she appeared to have zero interest in babies.

Botkin had two little brothers and was always baby-sitting, she recalled, but "Stanley never even baby-sat. She would come over to the house and just stand back, and her eyes would blink and her head would spin like, 'Oh, my God, what's going on here?' "

In the fall of 1960, as Botkin worried about whether she had the proper clothes to go through sorority rush at U-Dub, where they pinched the young women to make sure they were wearing girdles and where nylons were part of the uniform, she received her first letter from her friend in Hawai'i.

Stanley was enjoying newfound freedoms. She had ditched her first name and was now going by Ann. And no more nylons and perfect outfits, either.

"I'm wearing shorts and mu'umu'us to class," she wrote.

In the next letter, she said she was dating an African student she had met in Russian class. Botkin was more interested in the fact that her friend was studying Russian than in whom she was dating. But soon enough came a card revealing that Ann was in love, and then another that said she was married and expecting a baby in the summer.

Tomorrow: Part II, Obama's African father