Madelyn Dunham — now more famously known as Barack Obama's grandmother — will be remembered today at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, near the site where her husband's ashes are inurned in niche No. 440.

In August, Obama and his daughters walked up to Court 1, Wall B at Punchbowl and left two lei beneath the bronze plaque that honors the tall, silver-haired man Obama called Gramps.

Stanley Armour Dunham was entitled to be interred at Punchbowl because of his service during World War II. He was a sergeant in Patton's 7th Army in Europe, a charismatic figure who liked to drink and loved to tell stories but later struggled to make a living selling furniture and insurance in Honolulu.

He was, however, a success at being the primary man in the young life of the future president — after Obama's father left Hawai'i when the boy was just 2.

"They walked everywhere and little Barry was always with him," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who lived nearby and has been a family friend since. "He relished that little boy's company. When I would see them, Stanley would offer how bright Barry was and how well he was doing in school. He had ambitions for little Barry.

"That man loved Barry and everybody knew that," Abercrombie said. "He maybe had his weaknesses and his shortcomings, like other people, but love of that boy was not one of them. It was obvious to everybody and certainly must have been obvious to little Barry that his grandfather not only loved him but, more importantly, liked him and liked having him around and liked him as his pal."

ROLE MODELS

Dunham made a point of introducing Obama to positive black male role models around town, said Jerry Burris, co-author of "The Dream Begins: How Hawai'i Shaped Barack Obama."

"Stanley would take Barry along with him when he was visiting his buddies," Burris said. "I think he had in mind that Barry had to be exposed to some black males of substance. It wasn't just come along, see my friends. I think he was conscious of Barry seeing adult black male role models."

Madelyn Dunham, whom Obama called Toot, from the Hawaiian term for grandparent, tutu, has been credited with using her Kansas upbringing to help form the foundation of Obama's upbringing.

"From what you think you understand of Stanley, you don't see a lot of him in Barry," Burris said. "Barry isn't happy-go-lucky or a dreamer type. He's much more like grandma."

But Stanley Dunham had plenty of his own particular form of charm.

When Madelyn gave birth to their daughter, Stanley named her after himself, calling her Stanley Ann Dunham.

"She would later complain to her friends that her father had 'wanted a boy, but he got me,' " Burris and co-author Stu Glauberman wrote in their book.

Stanley and Madelyn grew up less than 20 miles away from each other in Kansas — she was from Augusta, he from El Dorado.

By the time he was 15, Stanley had been thrown out of high school for punching the principal in the nose, Obama wrote in his best-selling book, "Dreams From My Father."

"For the next three years he lived off odd jobs, hopping rail cars to Chicago, then California, then back again, dabbling in moonshine, cards, and women," Obama wrote. "As he liked to tell it, he knew his way around Wichita, where both his and Toot's families had moved by that time, and Toot doesn't contradict him; certainly, Toot's parents believed the stories that they'd heard about the young man and strongly disapproved of the budding courtship. The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at my grandfather's black, slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished assessment.

" 'He looks like a wop.'

"My grandmother didn't care."

Madelyn and Stanley eloped "just in time for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and my grandfather enlisted," Obama writes.

MOVING AROUND

Stanley never saw combat and in peacetime relocated his young bride to California, where he enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley through the GI bill. Stanley bounced the family back to Kansas, through Texas, Seattle and — finally — Honolulu in 1959, the same year Hawai'i became a state.

"He would whip out pictures of the family and offer his life story to the nearest stranger," Obama wrote. He "would pump the hand of the mailman or make off-color jokes to our waitresses at restaurants."

As Madelyn earned a series of promotions at Bank of Hawaii, which was then the Islands' largest bank in terms of assets, Stanley's career struggled to gain financial traction.

Madelyn's success "had become a source of delicacy and bitterness between them as his commissions paid fewer and fewer of the family's bills," Obama writes.

CANCER DEATH AT 73

Stanley Dunham died of prostate cancer in 1992 at age 73. His funeral at Punchbowl "was a small ceremony with a few of his bridge and golf partners in attendance, a three-gun salute, and a bugle playing taps," Obama wrote.

The next president of the U.S. says little else in his book about the loss of his grandfather — or what it meant to him.

He certainly never expressed his feelings to Abercrombie, one of Obama's first supporters in Congress.

"I simply don't know," Abercrombie said. "We have never entered into that discussion."

But whatever those emotions are, they must be complicated, Abercrombie said, especially as Obama mourns the loss of his grandmother, who died just two days before his historic election.

"It's always difficult to discern all the emotional implications of not having a father," Abercrombie said, "and then to lose a grandfather who was a substitute."