'They said this day would never come': the day Barack Obama spoke of was January 3, 2008, when he won the Iowa caucuses. Ten months tater, he's on his way to the White House as America's first Black President. A look at Obama's journey to the Oval Office.

• Author: Bilyeu, Suzanne
• Position: ELECTION 2008

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Four years ago, Barack Obama was a little-known Illinois state legislator running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Then he delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. He spoke of his African father and of his mother, who was from Kansas.

"I stand here knowing that my story is a part of the larger American story," said Obama. "In no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

The next day, as Obama moved through the meeting rooms and hallways, people whispered: Perhaps the man who had just passed by would one day be elected President. And earlier this month, he was.

His path to the White House has been an unusual one. Obama's parents met while studying at the University of Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was an economist who grew up herding goats in his native Kenya. His mother, Ann Dunham, was an anthropologist from Kansas. Barack Jr. was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

When Obama was a year old, his father left Hawaii for Harvard to study economics and then returned to Kenya, where he had another family from an earlier marriage. Obama's parents were divorced in 1964, and he only saw his father once more, in Hawaii, when he was 10. (Obama's father died in a car accident in 1982; his mother died of cancer in 1995.)

INDONESIAN CHILDHOOD

In 1967, Obama's mother married a man from Indonesia. The family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, where Obama spent his early school years. He attended Catholic school for two years, and then a public school. (Contrary to rumors during the campaign, Obama never attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, nor is he Muslim; he is a Christian.) At 10, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and enroll in the Punahou School, a private school in Honolulu.

In high school, his classmates regarded "Barry" as a pleasant guy with a B average, a confident gait, and a cheerful smile, who seemed happiest on the basketball court.

"He had the exact same mannerisms then as he does now," says Eric Kusunoki, Obama's homeroom teacher at Punahou. He recalls that when Obama strode to the podium to speak at the 2004 Democratic convention, "We recognized him right away by the way he walked. He was well-liked by everybody, a very charismatic guy."

Then there was the other Barry--the one who endured whispered racial slurs, haunted by a sense of being a misfit.

"He struggled here with the idea that people were pushing an identity on him, what it meant to be a black man," says Maya Soetero-Ng, Obama's half-sister, whose father is Indonesian.

While Obama has several half-siblings from his father's other marriages, Soetero-Ng, 39, is the only sibling he spent significant time with as a child in Indonesia and Hawaii.

"There was always a joke between my mom and Barack that he would be the first black President," Soetero-Ng says. "So there were intimations of all this early on. He has always been restless. There was always somewhere else he needed to go."

Obama's life has always seemed to reflect this restlessness. He graduated from high school in 1979 and moved to Los Angeles, where he attended Occidental College for...