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 man, who approached him menacingly.

Until his skinny, elite univerity-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.

There was a time before Obama wore tailored suits — when his wardrobe consisted of $5 military-surplus khakis and used leather jackets, and he walked the streets of Manhattan for lack of bus fare. It was a time well before the political arena beckoned, when his friends thought he might become a writer or a lawyer, but certainly not the first black man with a real chance to become president of the United States.

Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then in New York at olumbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, Dreams from My Father, talks about this time, but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as “Sadik” — “a short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party.

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