Madelyn Payne Dunham Tribute

On November 3, 2008, a day before the U.S. Presidential election, the Obama campaign announced that Madelyn Dunham had "died peacefully after a battle with cancer" in Hawaii. "She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility."

Barack Obama with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham during a 1982 visit to New York, where Obama was attending Columbia.
(Courtesy of The Obama Family)

"And she said, 'I just kind of worry about you. I hope you keep your head on straight.' "

Her name is Madelyn Payne Dunham, but to Obama she was always "Toot," a shortened version of Tutu, a Hawaiian word for grandmother or older female relative.

"I didn't want to be called Grandma," she explained in a 2004 interview.

"I still get yelled at by young men calling at me down the street, 'Hey toot!' once in a while," she added, laughing.

In his memoir Dreams From My Father, Obama described his grandmother as "suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense."

He also called her "a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank."

"What Toot believed kept her going were the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancesters," Obama wrote. "'So long as you kids do well, Bar,' she would say more than once, 'that's all that really matters.' "

A widow, Dunham, 84, still lives in Honolulu.

And if she was deliberately low-key about that convention speech when she first spoke with her grandson, Obama's grandmother let her true feelings show in the Sun-Times interview a few weeks later.

"I was a little amazed," she told a reporter. "It was really quite an exceptional speech, or I'm being prejudiced, I don't know. But, to me, it was really quite exceptional."