Obama: From unknown to nominee

He played golf and poker, he perfected his left-handed pump shot on a playground into the night (he had a minor role on his school's championship basketball team), he sang in the choir, he listened to the music of Earth Wind & Fire.

In some ways, he was a typical teen. In other ways, he was anything but: His mother was far away, his father was gone forever, he had already lived in a Third World nation and was growing up in the melting pot of Hawaii — all of which shaped him into someone who could easily adapt to change.

"My mother was pretty instrumental in helping Barack cultivate this internal flexibility," Maya says. "After the childhood we had, different could never be jarring or dislocating."

Those early years, though, were difficult for Obama.

"I spent much of my childhood adrift," he said in a recent speech. "Growing up I wasn't always sure who I was or what I was doing."

He struggled with questions about his race and identity, and in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," he described how he turned to drugs — including marijuana and cocaine — to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."

But he concealed that turmoil.

"He always has been a lone traveler," his half-sister says. "He's a gregarious guy and he loves people, but he also loves his own company. He doesn't expect those closest to him to be all things to him."

His personality, she adds, doesn't fit into one neat category.

Video   Obama: 'We've started something' Jan. 7: Barack Obama talks to NBC's Brian Williams on the road. He talks about his mother's influence in his life and the excitement around his campaign. Nightly News

"He is equal portions laid-back and deeply focused," Maya says. "It's not all fire inside of him. There are wide cool pools of water as well."

At Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama — who started using his given name, Barack — took his first plunge into politics, speaking at an anti-apartheid rally.

Obama was confident and casual on campus — he favored flip-flops, shorts and a trim Afro — and not one to dominate dorm discussions about political issues, such as the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan.

"He didn't get in people's faces," says Ken Sulzer, who lived in the same dorm and is now a California lawyer. "He wasn't trying to get people's goats or get a rise out of them."

Sulzer also remembers one particular Obama talent. While Sulzer took pages of notes during a class on political thought, Obama, he says, "would have two very pithy paragraphs and it would all be in there. ... He was a very good writer. He was succinct."

| Saturday, Aug. 23: Obama: From unknown to nominee 25 things about Barack Obama Sunday, Aug. 24: Spotlight on Denver Monday, Aug. 25: The dream and the reality

But Occidental was a small liberal arts college and Obama wanted to expand his horizons, so he transferred across the country to Columbia University in New York.

"I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk," he said in a 2005 Columbia alumni magazine interview.

Obama graduated with a political science degree and held a few jobs in New York. It was there he received a call from an aunt in Nairobi notifying him his father had been killed in an auto accident. The news eventually led Obama on a journey to Kenya and a tearful visit to his father's grave.

After New York, Obama headed to a city where he knew no one, taking a low-paying job, facing a formidable challenge — motivating poor people to participate in a political system that had traditionally shut them out.

Video   Obama's roots are in Chicago's South Side June 20: NBC's Tom Brokaw reports from Hyde Park, Ill., the historic neighborhood that Democratic nominee Barack Obama has been tied to since the late 1980s. Nightly News

Going to Chicago proved to be a much smarter move than it looked at first.

Starting out as a $12,000-a-year community organizer, Obama walked the run-down streets of the South Side that had been decimated by the loss of steel mills and factory jobs.

Working for the Developing Communities Project, Obama met with black pastors and tried to mobilize people to speak up for themselves — whether it was lobbying for a job training center or cleaning up public housing.

He established an easy rapport with people in the community, many of whom treated him like a son (they teasingly called him "baby face.")

"He would tell us you've got to do things right, you've got to take the high road," says Loretta Augustine-Herron, one of the project founders. "He would talk about no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. He would say, 'Don't get personalities involved."'

Obama — who calls his organizing work "the best education I ever had" — became a skilled conciliator, says Gerald Kellman, the man who hired him.

"He became very effective at getting people who did initially did not get along ... to work together and build alliances," Kellman says. "He found a way to be tough and challenging when he didn't like something. At the same time, he was not one to burn his bridges with people."

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