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Bill Snider bucked other classmates by calling him “Barack.”

“Everyone called him Barry,” Snider says. “I didn’t. I loved the name Barack.”

Thirty years ago, Snider, who  now owns Simple Kneads Bakery here, shared the proverbial battered collegiate sofa with Obama and others at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

The sofa was in the basement of Haines Hall next to Obama’s dorm room. Snider and other students who lived off campus hung out in the basement between classes.

Obama often joined them.

“We talked about music and politics,” Snider says, as well as a demand by Occidental students that the college divest its investments in South Africa.

“A big movement was under way for (Ted) Kennedy,” he says. “I personally supported John Anderson. Actually, my freshman year, I was a college Republican.”

Nevertheless, he had a lot in common with Obama.

“We were both scholarship students,” says Snider, an Ohio native. “We came a great distance to Occidental. Neither of us had a father. My father died when I was 6. We were both broke.”

Snider says the Obama he sees on television seems like the same deliberate — and politically moderate — guy who at Occidental always thought through decisions about his studies and his life.

“His smile was remarkable in college,” Snider says. “It was eerie during the 2006 campaign to cut on the TV and see that smile. He looked the same except a little gray. He was still skinny and youthful-looking.”

It was also eerie when Snider, once so close to Obama at Haines Hall, stood behind his bakery in an alley off South Elm Street. 

From there, he could see the crowd gathered around Obama for a rally at The Depot.

This was as close Snider has come to Obama since college, and he doubts if Obama knows his whereabouts.

Snider now views himself as a political independent. But anyone entering Simple Kneads during the 2008 campaign knew where he stood.

He didn’t worry about offending some customers by displaying Obama stickers. His now-14-year-old daughter, Roxanne, campaigned for Obama.

After his sophomore year at Occidental in 1981, Obama transferred across the continent to Columbia University and later went to Harvard law school.

Even though Occidental ranks high academically, Snider says Obama felt he was having too much fun. Obama believed he’d face fewer distractions at Columbia.

Snider replies with an emphatic “no” when asked whether Obama, while a student at Occidental, was already thinking of running for president someday. 

When he did run and win, “I think he was pretty shocked himself,” Snider says.

After graduating from Occidental, Snider earned a master’s in journalism at  Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

He moved to Washington and wrote for Education Weekly. He married and relocated to San Francisco, where he edited the newsletter and a book for the George Lucas Educational Foundation.

His wife at that time was from Raleigh. They decided to move to North Carolina and chose Greensboro.

Snider worked five years in marketing for IBM. All along, the couple wanted a change in careers.

They found a new one in the gourmet kitchen of their Summerfield home: artisanal baking.

They baked bread and other goodies and sold them at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market.

People encouraged them to open a store. They did in 2001.

Now divorced and the bakery’s sole owner, Snider thought he’d have to close in February. Fortunately business has picked up. He bakes for various restaurants here, in Winston-Salem and Kernersville, in addition to over-the-counter sales at the bakery.

He senses Obama is happy being president, despite the criticism he endures. 

Snider is happy, too, with the bakery, despite the economic ups and downs. 

He especially likes Greensboro, calling it “a perfect place to raise a family.”

He wants his daughter to meet Obama and feels it might happen.

“Someday, after he is done, there will be a time to catch  up,” Snider says. “I know he is incredibly busy right now.”

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net