LOLO SOETORO :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Obama Family Tree
'A piece of tiger meat'
September 9, 2007
BY SCOTT FORNEK Political Editor
Lolo Soetoro's first name meant "crazy" in Hawaiian.
"But the meaning didn't suit the man, for Lolo possessed the good manners and easy grace of his people," Barack Obama wrote of his Indonesian stepfather in Dreams From My Father.
Obama wrote that Soetoro's "tennis game was good, his smile uncommonly even, and his temperament imperturbable."
But Obama's mother's second husband did have his exotic side, which he shared with the young Obama during the years they lived in Indonesia.
"With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)," Obama wrote. "LIke many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share."
Soetoro worked for the Indonesian government and later a U.S. oil company before he and Obama's mother divorced in the late 1970s. Soetoro died of a liver ailment in 1987 at age 51.
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