NEW YORK (AP) - The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog's head.
This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city's derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the bum, who approached him menacingly.
Until his skinny, Ivy League-educated friend—Barack Obama—intervened.
He "stepped right in between. ... He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. `Hey, hey, hey.' And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking," Siddiqi recalls.
...They remember a good student with a sharp mind and unshakable integrity, a young man who already had a passion for the underprivileged. Some described the young Obama's personality as confident to the point of arrogance, a criticism that would emerge decades later, during the campaign.
...Thummalapally lived with Obama the summer of 1980. The two ran together daily, three miles in the early morning, often chatting about their dreams. Thummalapally wanted to start a business back home; Obama talked about helping people.
"I want to get into public service," he recalls Obama saying. "I want to write and help people who are disadvantaged."
...When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi—a friend of Chandoo's and Hamid's from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama's idealism—he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor.
"At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously," Siddiqi said. "I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He'd give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating."
...In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge.
"We didn't have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application," Siddiqi said.
Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama "wanted no part of it. He put down the truth."
The apartment was "a slum of a place" in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. "It wasn't a comfortable existence. We were slumming it." What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps.
While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples.
But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.
...Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi's mother, who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate—he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but "he was really patient. I'm surprised he suffered me."
...Siddiqi has not kept in touch. His has been a difficult road; years after his time with Obama, Siddiqi says, he became addicted to cocaine and lost his business.
But when he needed help during his recovery, Obama—the roommate he drove away with his partying, the man he always suspected of looking down at him—gave him a job reference.
So yes, he's an Obama man, too. Witness the message on his answering machine:
"My name is Hal Siddiqi, and I approve of this message. Vote for peace, vote for hope, vote for change, and vote for Obama."
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D90M8EUO0&show_article=1I had to put the bit in about E. 94th Street. In 1984, I moved a block away at E. 95th and 1st, and, as the article states, it was a hell-hole. No Obama sightings that I can remember though...
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