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"He ended up being the kind of man who would solve problems on his own," Maya says. "He always has been a lone traveler. He's a gregarious guy and he loves people, but ... he doesn't expect those closest to him to be all things to him."

Some have suggested Obama's cool demeanor may be a bit too chilly, but his half-sister rejects that notion.

"He understands what it means to be a regular guy," Maya explains. "He is equal portions laid back and deeply focused. He has a sense of humor. It's not all fire inside of him. There are wide pools of water as well."

After high school, Obama entered Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he started using his birth name, Barack, and took his first plunge into politics, speaking at an anti-apartheid rally.

Obama was confident and casual on campus -- he favored flip-flops, shorts and a trim Afro -- and not one to dominate dorm discussions about political issues such as the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan.

"He didn't get in people's faces," says Ken Sulzer, a dorm mate who is now a California lawyer. "He wasn't trying to get people's goats or get a rise out of them."

But Occidental was a small liberal arts college and Obama wanted broader horizons, so he moved across the country to attend Columbia University in New York.

Obama graduated with a political science degree and held a few jobs in New York. It was there he received a call from an aunt notifying him his father had been killed in an auto accident. The news eventually led Obama on a journey to Kenya and a tearful visit to his father's grave.

After New York, Obama moved to Chicago. He knew no one in the city and was stepping into a low-paying job with a formidable mission: motivating poor people to participate in a political system that had traditionally shut them out.

Chicago proved to be a much smarter move than it looked at first.

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Obama had a beat-up Honda and a city map to navigate the streets as a community organizer on the South Side, a cluster of poor neighborhoods ravaged by the loss of steel mills and factory jobs.

Working for the Developing Communities Project, Obama met with black pastors and tried to mobilize people to agitate for themselves -- whether it was lobbying for a job training center or cleaning up public housing.

He quickly won over skeptics, says Loretta Augustine-Herron, one of the project founders.

"He looked so young and tender" and the ladies soon dubbed him "babyface Obama," she recalls. "But he was very businesslike, very respectful. He had incredible people skills. He would keep us on task to move us along, to make things happen. If we'd get distracted, he'd shake his head and say, 'Come on guys. This is important.'"

She says Obama also offered sensible advice: "He would talk about no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. He would say, 'Don't get personalities involved.'"

Obama -- who calls his organizing work "the best education I ever had" -- gradually became a skilled conciliator, says Gerald Kellman, the man who hired him.

"He became very effective at getting people who initially did not get along ... to work together and build alliances," Kellman says. "He found a way to be tough and challenging when he didn't like something. At the same time, he was not one to burn his bridges."

Chicago became the place where Obama set down roots.

He joined the Trinity United Church of Christ and became friends with its pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose incendiary comments about race and America would later raise questions about Obama's judgment and threaten to derail his presidential campaign. (Obama denounced the remarks after they created a national uproar; he no longer attends the church.)

Chicago also was Obama's political boot camp, where he learned about the power of coalitions and the importance of making connections.

But Obama was not all work. He wrote short fictional stories that evocatively captured the feel of the streets. (He would later write two best-selling books, one of them a memoir.)

Obama also remained close to his family. Maya, who is nine years younger, recalls how he "really took on the role of a father," after her own father died. He escorted her on college tours, introduced her to jazz, blues and classical music -- and, much later, consoled her when their mother died of ovarian cancer at age 53.

After three years as an organizer, Obama had become increasingly pragmatic about what he could accomplish. "The victories were small, they changed peoples' lives, but they didn't change American society and he wanted to do that," Kellman says.

Obama took a giant leap from the gritty South Side to the heady atmosphere of Harvard Law School, the training ground for America's elite. He made history as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, perhaps the most prestigious law journal in the nation.

The distinction brought a flood of publicity. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Obama said a Harvard education "means you can take risks. You can try to do things to improve society and still land on your feet."

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