Today is Barack Obama's 64th birthday. The fiery Leo and former president of the United States is one of the most beloved politicians, and made history as the first African American to hold the office. After serving as the 44th president from 2009 to 2017, Barack and his family remain in the spotlight. Barack and Michelle Obama have been married for 32 years, welcoming their daughter Malia and Sasha Obama in 1998 and 2001. In honor of Barack's birthday, check out some photos of him throughout the years with 10 fun facts.
Barack was scooping ice cream as a teen in Hawaii. "Scooping ice cream is tougher than it looks. Rows and rows of rock-hard ice cream can be brutal on the wrists,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “As a teenager working behind the counter at Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu, I was less interested in what the job meant for my future and more concerned about what it meant for my jump shot.”
Barack became president during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The 2008 crash was so serious that people started calling it the Great Recession. By the time Obama left office in January 2017, after two terms, his approval rating was around 60%, higher than most presidents at the end of their time in the White House.
Michelle is not the first woman he has proposed to
Before Michelle, Barack was in a relationship with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who is now a professor at Oberlin College. She told historian DavidGarrow that he proposed to her in 1986. She said "not yet," but a year later, he had his sights on becoming president, and began dating Michelle in 1990, per Vanity Fair.
When Barack was sworn in, he used the same Bible Abraham Lincoln used 148 years earlier. No other president had used it since Lincoln. At his second inauguration, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible was added.
Barack was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, only 8 months into his presidency, for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” It's only been won by four American Presidents.
Barack lived in Indonesia when he was six to ten and spoke the language. When he returned in 2010, he made a speech recalling, "I first came to this country when my mother married an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro. And as a young boy I was -- as a young boy I was coming to a different world. But the people of Indonesia quickly made me feel at home."
The former president is an avid comic book lover. “I grew up loving comic books. Back in the day, I was pretty into Conan the Barbarian and Spiderman. Anyone who reads comics can tell you, every main character has an origin story — the fateful and usually unexpected sequence of events that made them who they are,” he wrote in an email.
Barack was the first president to make beer on White House grounds using honey from Michelle’s garden and a home brewing kit he paid for himself. The result was White House Honey Ale, Honey Porter, and in 2012, they released the recipe for them.
