Madelyn Dunham blazed a trail for women in banking

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Madelyn Dunham blazed a trail for women in banking
By Susan Essoyan

POSTED: 12:35 p.m. HST, Nov 03, 2008

Madelyn Payne Dunham opened doors for women at Bank of Hawaii with a firm hand and no fanfare, the same way she helped raise her grandson, Barack Obama.

Dunham, 86, died last night after a battle with cancer, according to a statement from Obama and his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.

Petite and determined, Dunham rose from clerk to bank vice president in the space of a decade, one of two women to reach that position at Bankoh in 1970, the first ever. Dunham remained reserved then, just as she was decades later when the world’s spotlight shone on her grandson.

“She’s a very down-to-earth person, a tiny little woman,” said Alice Dewey, a University of Hawaii professor emeritus and family friend. “No nonsense.”

During Obama’s historic campaign for the U.S. presidency, Dunham steadfastly declined media interviews. Ill and frail, she stayed cloistered in the two-bedroom Punahou-area apartment where she and her late husband Stanley had helped raise “Barry.”

Obama brought his family to Hawaii to visit her in August and paid tribute to her when he accepted his party’s nomination later that month.

“She’s the one who taught me about hard work,” he said. “She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me.”

Just 11 days before the election, Obama suspended his campaign to fly to Honolulu again and spend time with Dunham after she broke her hip and her health failed. He said Dunham, who turned 86 on Oct. 26, was alert but might not live until Election Day.

Dunham had appeared briefly in one campaign commercial, her spine hunched with osteoporosis, saying she believed her grandson had “a lot of depth and a broadness of view.”

In what appears to be her last public interview, in 2004, Dunham told the Chicago Sun-Times that she was “a little amazed” by Obama’s keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, the speech that first catapulted him into the nation’s consciousness. With her grandson, however, she was more circumspect.

“She called up, and she said, ‘You did well,’” Obama recounted the day after that speech. “And I said, ‘Thank you.’ And she said, ‘I just kind of worry about you. I hope you keep your head on straight.’”

Keeping your head on straight, working hard and working wise, treating your neighbor as yourself, those were watchwords for Madelyn Payne Dunham. Obama, who called her “Toot,” short for the Hawaiian word “Tutu,” credits her with passing on those values she grew up with in small-town Kansas. Like many grandparents in Hawaii, she and her husband played a big role in his life.

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