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WASHINGTON — President Obama has called Hawaii his refuge, and so it has been throughout his political life. In 2006, Mr. Obama used the family Christmas holiday there to decide whether to run for president. For the past two weeks, he has been recharging on Oahu after an unpleasant year in the job.

Punahoe Schools/Associated Press

In a photo caption from the  1978 Punahou School yearbook, Barack Obama gives a special mention to the "Choom Gang."

As is usual when on the island, the president has been far from political advisers and hangers-on, and has instead spent time with the high school friends who have come to be known collectively, if inaccurately, as the "Choom Gang."

For a reputed loner, Mr. Obama has remained remarkably close to a trio he met as a teenager at Honolulu's prestigious Punahou School — boys of Hawaii's year-round summer with whom he played basketball, bodysurfed, drank beer and, like so many other young islanders in the 1970s, smoked pot, the "choom" of that long-ago nickname.

Now they mainly just golf — more than 30 hours in six outings this vacation — and trash-talk, just like in the old days.

After years during which the friends grew apart, Mr. Obama reconnected with Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme a decade ago. They agreed to rendezvous in Hawaii every year for the holidays, and their reunions became regular even as Mr. Obama was busy climbing to senator and president, a path none of them imagined nearly four decades ago and 5,000 miles from Washington.

The annual gatherings perhaps speak to Mr. Obama's greater need for their connection now that he has what is called the loneliest job in the world. "For the president to be able to be with a group where he can be absolutely relaxed — a group that knows him from his youth on, and who he knows are friends with him not because of what he became, but because of who he is — is a really comforting and warm thing," said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's longtime strategist.

Not many presidents retained friendships from as far back as high school, although George W. Bush had close friends from his prep school days at Andover. John F. Kennedy had his band of brothers from wartime. Some, like Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, counted later acquaintances among political donors as friends.

But generally, said the presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, "It does seem like these presidents need to find a sanctuary — whether it's a place or a group of people — where they can just be themselves and feel the connection from the present to the past." High school friends who predate adulthood and professional attainments often know each other's siblings, parents, even grandparents — and know each other in a way that later friends often cannot. "I brood," Mr. Obama's friend Mr. Ramos said a few years ago. "He's not like that."

Mr. Ramos was a year ahead of Mr. Obama's Punahou class of '79, but played with him on the basketball team. Like Mr. Obama, he was of mixed parentage — the son of a Filipino father and a Czech mother — and his parents were divorced. He knew the "really small apartment" that Mr. Obama lived in with his grandparents and what a talker "Gramps" was.

Although the Choom Gang has come to define Mr. Obama's high school circle — owing partly to the president's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," and a notation that Mr. Obama made in his senior yearbook thanking the group for good times — Mr. Ramos said in an interview after leaving Oahu this week that the phrase does not describe their circle. He said that of the three, only Mr. Orme, another Punahou hoops player, was in the gang that Mr. Obama described.

And while they did enjoy marijuana, Mr. Ramos acknowledged, "we played a lot more basketball than we smoked pot."

Get-togethers in the decades after high school were rare as the men built careers and families, although Mr. Ramos, Mr. Titcomb and Mr. Orme attended the Obamas' Chicago wedding in 1992. Only Mr. Titcomb stayed in Hawaii. Mr. Obama and the others often would visit family members there at Christmas and on occasion the men would meet, but it was not until 2004 that they agreed to gather annually.