A girl named Stan...

Chip Wall can't help but zero in on the little stuff whenever he watches Barack Obama on TV.

It's his old pal Stanley.

For Wall and a few dozen others, Obama on the campaign trail often brings to mind Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama's mother and a strong-willed, unconventional member of the Mercer Island High School graduating class of 1960.

"She was not a standard-issue girl of her times...

"She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," the only child was a ... daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley -- after himself.

Stanley Ann Dunham's formative years, spent not on the Great Plains but more than 1,800 miles away on a small island in the Pacific Northwest.

Stanley Dunham died in 1992, and the Obama campaign declined to make Madelyn Dunham, 84, available.

In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.

The marriage failed. Stanley Ann filed for divorce in 1964 and remarried two years later, when her son was 5. The senior Obama finished his work at Harvard and returned to Kenya, where he hoped to realize his big dreams of taking a place in the Kenyan government.

Years later, Abercrombie and another grad school friend looked up their old pal during a trip through Africa.

At that point, the senior Obama was a bitter man, according to the congressman, feeling that he had been denied due opportunities to influence the running of his country. "He was drinking too much; his frustration was apparent," .

To Abercrombie's surprise, Obama never asked about his ex-wife or his son.