"He was very black, probably the blackest person I've ever met," recalled Zane, a Chinese Hawaiian, who now runs an antiques shop a few miles from the university. "Handsome in his own way. But the most impressive thing was his voice. His voice and his inflection -- he had this Oxford accent. You heard a little Kenyan English, but more this British accent with this really deep, mellow voice that just resounded. If he said something in the room and the room was not real noisy, everybody stopped and turned around. I mean he just had this wonderful, wonderful voice. He was charismatic as a speaker."

It was not just the voice, said Neil Abercrombie, who went on to become a congressman from Honolulu, but Obama's entire outsize persona -- the lanky 6-foot-1 frame, the horn-rimmed glasses, the booming laugh, the pipe and an "incredibly vital personality."

"He was brilliant and opinionated and avuncular and opinionated. Always opinionated," Abercrombie said. "If you didn't know him, you might be put off by him. He never hesitated to tell you what he thought, whether the moment was politic or not. Even to the point sometimes where he might seem a bit discourteous. But his view was, well, if you're not smart enough to know what you're talking about and you're talking about it, then you don't deserve much in the way of mercy. He enjoyed the company of people who were equally as opinionated as he was."

An interesting note about the snack bar crowd is that, even decades later, they all pronounce the first name of their Kenyan friend "Bear-ick" -- with the accent on the first syllable. That is how he referred to himself, they said. In Hawaii at least, they never heard him call himself "Buh-rock," with the accent on the second syllable, the pronunciation his son would adopt in his adult life. Perhaps it was a minor accommodation to westernization.

In late November, a few months into Obama's first semester, the Honolulu paper wrote another story about him, this time focusing on his positive conclusions about racial attitudes on the island. "No one seems to be conscious of color," he said. But there were stereotypes to shatter on both sides -- his of Hawaii and Hawaii's of Africa. "When I first came here, I expected to find a lot of Hawaiians all dressed in native clothing and I expected native dancing and that sort of thing, but I was surprised to find such a mixture of races," he acknowledged.

When asked if people questioned him about Kenya, he laughed and said: "Oh, yes. People are very interested in the Mau Mau rebellion [a long-standing uprising against the British] and they ask about race relations in Kenya. I tell them they've improved since the rebellion but are not perfect. They also ask if Kenya is ready for self-government. Some others ask me such questions as how many wives each man has back home, what we eat, how I dress at home, how we live, whether we have cars."

He did not answer those questions in the story. Nor, on one matter, was he forthcoming with his friends at the university. Neither newspaper readers nor his fellow students knew that he had left a son and a pregnant wife back in Kenya.

The events in Africa intrigued Obama's fellow students and were inevitably part of the movable discussion, which often went from the university snack bar over to the Stardust Lounge or George's Inn, where pitchers of beer cost two bucks, and then on to Peter Gilpin's apartment nearby. As they listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on the hi-fi, Obama pontificated on Kenya and nationalism and colonialism and his fears about what might happen. "He was very concerned that tribalism would trump nationalism," Neil Abercrombie said. "And that people like himself would not be properly recognized, would not be fully utilized, and there would be discrimination and prejudice. Jomo Kenyatta [Kenya's first post-colonial leader] was a Kikuyu, and Barack and Mboya were Luo, and Kikuyu were going to run things. We'd get into it that deeply."

Late in the summer of 1960, at the start of his second year and the beginning of her first, Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham met in a beginning Russian class. He was 25; she was not yet 18. She called him "Bear-ick," too. He called her Anna. Decades later, Ann would tell her son a story about their first date that he then depicted in his memoir "Dreams From My Father." "He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. I got there and he hadn't arrived, but I figured I'd give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. An hour later he showed up with a couple of friends. I woke up and three of them were standing over me and I heard him saying, serious as can be . . . 'You see gentlemen, I told you she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.' "

Recounting the scene long after the fact, knowing how the relationship would end, the son was at his most lyrical. "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father's attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents' lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs, but it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that's how any love begins."

This was the prelude to the beginning of the second Barack Obama, the hapa, and in the narrative he creates about his mother, here, as always after, he writes with the sensibility not so much of a son as of an acute if sympathetic psychologist, approaching condescension but not quite crossing that line.

During his time in Hawaii, the elder Obama seemed adept at walling off various aspects of his life. He eventually told Ann about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced, which she would discover years later was a lie. While the scene in the book includes two friends who were with him when he arrived late for a first date with Ann, few members of the snack bar crowd remember the Obama-Dunham relationship. Hal Abercrombie said he never saw them together. Pake Zane, who left the island for a spell in 1961, could not recall Ann from those days but had precise memories of Obama.