Profile: Madelyn Dunham

Barack Obama is briefly suspending his campaign to visit his sick grandmother. Madelyn Dunham was a central figure in the early life of the US presidential candidate.

Mr Obama's childhood was largely spent in the care of his grandparents.

She and her late husband Stanley raised the young Barack in Hawaii for many years while his mother, who had remarried, lived abroad.

Known within the family as "Toot", a shortened form of the Hawaiian word "tutu" meaning grandmother, she gave him a stable home and the traditional American values brought from her own Midwestern childhood.

She was also a trailblazer in her own right, having risen from a lowly position to be one of the first women vice-presidents of the Bank of Hawaii. . .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/us_elections_2008/7681648.stm

fact that he is suspending his participation in the campaign to visit this wonderful influence in his life. Says a lot about his character to me.

She would have been 90 this year.

A real Rosie The Riveter; first woman in the U.S. to win a War Production Board award, and Eleanor Roosevelt flew to Detroit to congratulate her.

Later, she raised two sons alone while doing laundry at a Detroit high school. In retirement, she was an award-winning doll maker featured in national magazines.

She was special. I miss her.