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With the hourly deluge that is the Trump news cycle, it can be easy to forget that Barack Obama was our president just eight months ago. For some of us, it has felt too long since we’ve seen that familiar—and downright presidential—grin. In hopes of reproducing it, and to commemorate his birthday, we’ve got five factoids you probably didn’t know about the 44th President, from the time he was rejected as a model to a young Obama’s dreams of being an architect.
Happy Birthday, President Obama! We promise we won’t ask you for proof.
While at Harvard, he once attempted to model for a calendar (and he was promptly rejected by the judging committee)
When Obama was at Harvard, a classmate decided to create a calendar featuring 12 of the school’s most promising African-American male law students (as a response to damning portrayals of black men in mainstream media). According to a New York Times article from 1991, the student, Troy Chapman, hoped the project featuring Harvard’s brightest would paint a different picture. With 90 or so black male law students that year, the competition was apparently so fierce that Chapman employed the help of many of the school’s 110 African-American female students to decide who would ultimately make the cut. Obama was a student, and while one might think he’d be a shoe-in, the judges thought otherwise—the fact that he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review apparently didn’t help him, either.
He is baby-crazyObama has been known to love children, and told CBS’s Gayle King last year that kids were some of his more memorable visitors over the years at the White House. “I love getting on the ground with babies in the Oval Office,” he said. “And they’re unrestrained so they will run around. They will take out all the apples out of the bowl and set them in various places and then put them back. They’re out of control,” he noted, laughing. His chief official White House photographer would often capture the former president playing with toddlers in the West Wing, and images reveal that he had no qualms about joining them in their crawling adventures on the floor, as he did most notably with Ella Harper Rhodes, the daughter of former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.
He carried lucky charms in his pocket during his presidencyFor President Obama, personal stories have always been central to not only his campaign, but his belief system of what unites us as people. In January of 2016, he revealed to YouTube vlogger Ingrid Nilsen that he always carried a few pieces of memorabilia or lucky charms given to him over the years to remind him of this. “Ever since I started running for office, people started handing me things when I'd speak to a crowd—little lucky charms or keepsakes, or things that meant something to them. And so now I have a habit of I always carry around . . . a few things that I just stick in my pocket to remind me of all the people I’ve met along the way and the stories they told me.” Among the items Obama procured from his pocket during the interview were rosary beads from Pope Francis, a small Buddha statuette, and a poker chip from a biker guy with a “big handlebar mustache and a bunch of tats.” Though he admits he’s not very superstitious, he looked to them as symbols of the faith of his constituents. “If I feel tired or I feel discouraged sometimes, I can reach into my pocket, and I say, ‘Yeah, that’s something I can overcome because somebody gave me this privilege to work on these issues that are going to affect them. I better get back to work.’”
Speaking of stories, he is a writer of short onesIn an interview with then New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani about the importance of reading fiction—beloved by Obama from the time he was a child for allowing him a sense of escapism after having grown up in several countries and feeling, at times, culturally displaced—he shared that, while he was in college, he wrote short stories. “At that time, writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my life—race, class, family,” he explained. “And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole.” A believer that fiction can bridge the gaps between even the most different of people, Obama famously quoted To Kill A Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch in his farewell address: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” It received, as one can imagine, roaring applause from the crowd. “Fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and was a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this country,” he told Kakutani.
He wanted to be an architect, but didn’t have the creative chops for itIn 2011, while at a dinner for Eduardo Souto de Moura, the recipient of that year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, Obama admitted that he had early dreams of being an architect. He went into politics when he reportedly discovered that he wasn’t as “creative” as he hoped to be. In his speech, he said that, to him, architecture was all about “creating buildings and spaces that inspire us, that help us do our jobs, that bring us together, and that become, at their best, works of art that we can move through and live in.” Revealing that he believed architecture is “the most democratic of art forms,” his switch to politics seemed a natural choice.