From Homeless to Harvard

Lowell Scholar Success Story

by Bella English, Boston Globe staff
Reprinted from the July 3, 2003 Boston Globe

Lauralee Summer, AB '98

Lauralee Summer has come home for a few days to stay with her mother in the top floor of an old house hard by a busy thoroughfare. At night, she sleeps on the sofa, which her mother, Elizabeth, has covered with a soft quilt that she bought for $10 on the Stop & Shop clearance table. "Lauralee has always wanted a quilt," says Elizabeth, who has also bought mylar balloons that say "Welcome Home!" and "Way to Go!"

That Lauralee Summer's mother loves her is not in question, never has been. But the mother was unable to do what most children take for granted: set a schedule, make sure she went to school, get meals on the table, make a stable home. For much of Summer's childhood, mother and daughter moved from shelter to welfare hotel to temporary room to a relative's house. The shelters harbored drug addicts and sex offenders, but also kind folks down on their luck. At the welfare hotels, moms stood in line to use a single microwave. Nights were punctuated by fights and drug deals that made sleep difficult. While staying in one shelter, Lauralee, then 9, and an older girl shoplifted thousands of dollars in goods over several months before being busted. Another year, she attended four different schools.

From all this chaos and poverty sprang a young woman who loved books and hated conformity. With the help of a dedicated high school mentor, Lauralee Summer would earn a scholarship to Harvard, where she cleaned toilets 10 hours a week and graduated with honors in 1998. (She developed her own major, children's studies, which focused on the effect of poverty on children's development.)

For a class her senior year, she began writing about her life, as if putting it on paper would help make sense of it. The result: Learning Joy From Dogs Without Collars, her memoir. It's a kind of "Homeless to Harvard" saga--a phrase that she sardonically notes has a better ring to it than "Vagabond to Vanderbilt," "Poor to Princeton," or "Destitute to Dartmouth." The title is from a poem by a homeless youth that concludes: "We have learned patience from statues in a thousand parks and joy from dogs without collars."

Summer, 26, has her own home now, an apartment in California, where she is earning a master's degree in education at Berkeley. She was recently in the Boston area for a book reading and signing, to visit her mother, and to spend time at a shelter for homeless boys in Somerville. At Wordsworth in Harvard Square, she read from a chapter called "Making a Room of Your Own." It talks about what home means and how you find it.

To her, home is not a place; it is people. "Having grown up in so many places, I don't associate ‘home' with any one place," she says, sitting on her mother's couch. "I think the connections you form really keep you centered and feeling okay and at home."

While she speaks, her 62-year-old mother looks through boxes of family pictures, chuckling over some, passing others to her daughter. One wall of her apartment is covered in family photos, hung with fading red, green, or gold ribbon. "There's Lauralee's section," says her mother. A closer look reveals her child at various ages with various hair colors: blue to match her prom dress, bright red, green, and one in which it's six different colors.

From Place to Place

Today, Lauralee's hair is raven black. She's still got a small silver stud in her nose, but her various ear piercings had to go, because when she wrestled--on the varsity team in both high school and college--they'd get ripped out. Her left leg bears a Dunkin' Donuts tattoo; she has a soft spot for the place where she and her school friends hung out, and where her mother sometimes sat up all night, with nowhere else to go.

People will ask her what was wrong with her mother; why couldn't she provide a real home for her daughter? It's not a question she really answers, either in her book or in person.

"She's very tough and independent," says the daughter, choosing her words carefully. "As for why she is the way she is, it's very complex. Some of it is personality reasons, and some of it is the times she grew up in. She had limited choices, and she went through a lot of grieving."

That grieving is the way Summer begins her book, with her mother's account of what happened in Oregon when she lost custody of her four children. Following their divorce, Elizabeth and her former husband worked out a schedule where he visited the children for two hours every Wednesday night; one of those evenings, when he was to bring them back to their mother, he found a note on her door: "On vacation for a week. Lots of love. See you soon! Mom."

It was January 1976. Elizabeth had simply shut the door and left, beds unmade, dishes undone, toys scattered. When she returned, her ex-husband sued for custody, saying she had abandoned the children. He won.

By that time, however, Elizabeth was pregnant with Lauralee, conceived the day she left the note during an encounter with a casual boyfriend. For the next several years, she and her young daughter bounced from place to place, since Elizabeth, a free spirit, "refused to take a job that would force her to suppress her intellectual longings and capacity," her daughter writes.

There were other losses: Elizabeth's beloved brother died at the age of 21 of leukemia, and one of her sons died of muscular dystrophy at 15. Elizabeth's father had been a philandering alcoholic, and Lauralee surmises that all these things combined to make her mother "withdraw from people."

As a girl, Lauralee would explode in anger at her mother because of "the tension between being ashamed and angry and still loving her," she writes. Elizabeth often wore her coat and winter knit hat indoors, year round. She never threw a thing away, which resulted in a cluttered mess. And she was impulsive: She took her daughter here and there on buses, from Oregon to California, to Arizona, back to Oregon and, finally, to Boston.

The periodic jobs Elizabeth took typically paid around $5 an hour with no benefits; so, rather than leave her daughter in cheap day care, she usually did not work at all. It wasn't until she studied poverty and homelessness at Harvard that Lauralee really understood her mother's choices, which had relegated them to a nomadic existence--including 20 moves by the time Lauralee was 12.

A Fresh Start

In 1989, they headed east. Summer says her mother told her that Boston "had good schools and was rich with cultural history." Thus began a stay at shelters, welfare hotels, and rented rooms throughout the Boston area. Finally, Elizabeth asked the state Department of Social Services to place Lauralee in a foster home, since she could not provide shelter for her. Elizabeth checked herself in at Father Bill's shelter in Quincy.

The foster home was just what the eighth-grader needed. For the first time in her life, there were rules, regular meals, and order. But the placement didn't last long; her mother had found shelter for both of them with a woman and her disabled daughter. The Summers shared a bedroom with rusted metal cots and a bare lightbulb, and Lauralee enrolled in Quincy High School. Lauralee would take her second-hand skateboard all over Quincy: It was free transportation. To give her room to do homework, her mother slept on the couch for the next four years.

Thanks to the high school's alternative program, run by Charles Maclaughlin, Lauralee made decent grades, joined the boys' wrestling team--there were few girls' sports--and found a place at Harvard. She wasn't the top student in her high school class (twentieth in a class of 300), and her SATs weren't perfect (1,450 out of 1,600).

But her admissions essay set her apart from the multitudes of privileged Harvard kids.

"I wrote about my mom mostly, and a little about being homeless," she says. "I wrote about wanting to help other homeless kids."

Her senior year at Quincy High, she spent mornings volunteering with special-needs kids and nights taking classes at Harvard Extension School, where a professor encouraged her to apply to Harvard College.

In her memoir, she writes about moving into Harvard Yard, assisted by her Quincy friends: "Mary carried a trash bag filled with blankets and sheets in one hand and a bunch of pillows in the other. Jeff had the violin and assorted backpacks, and I carried another big plastic bag and my skateboard. Anxious parents carting large sealed boxes, expensive luggage sets, and assorted furniture filled the building's hallways. Some of them gave us strange looks." That first night in the dorm, she dyed her hair fire orange, for both a fresh start and an "autumn look."

For a long time, she felt more comfortable around homeless people than her classmates. "I was with all these students who had the benefit of private schools and stable families," she says. "They were brilliant and driven. I thought, they're going to kick me out." She was on scholarship and grants, working two jobs to pay the bills.

Many stops from Quincy on the Red Line, Harvard was a world away. Books were too expensive, so Lauralee borrowed them from the library or photocopied chapters. Though diversity was celebrated--ethnic, religious, political, and sexual--no one talked about class diversity. Every night, she would call her mother at the homeless shelter's pay phone.

On Parents' Weekend, Elizabeth Summer took the train, hauling her belongings in several bags through Harvard Square. "From the moment I met her at the T station, where she emerged laden down with her duffel bags and layers of clothes, I knew that my Parents' Weekend would be different from anyone else's," writes Lauralee. While the other students were dining or shopping with parents, Elizabeth left before dinner because she had to check in at the shelter by 6:30 pm.

Forgive and Understand

One of the most poignant parts of the book deals with the father Lauralee never met until she wrote him a letter when she was a sophomore in college. Her mother had settled for a lump settlement of $4,000 when Lauralee was born, and they hadn't been in contact since. When he got Lauralee's letter, her father wrote back right away, and the two have become close; Lauralee says she loves her stepmother, too.

"I wanted to know where the other half of my genes came from," she says. "Meeting my dad was like being reborn at 19." Both father and daughter were surprised at the depth of feeling they discovered for each other, and what they have in common; both are athletic, driven, emotional.

Toward both her parents, Summer shows an extraordinary ability not only to forgive but to understand. Of her absent father, she writes: "I imagine being 40 years old, in the midst of a successful law career, a divorced man with three teenage children, who had been involved in a casual relationship with a woman who had unexpectedly become pregnant." He came to her Harvard graduation and made a 14-day cross-country trip with her when she moved to Berkeley.

Lauralee's father, Bob Morgan, a semi-retired judge living in Oregon, says unabashedly, "I love her dearly. She knows that, and my other children know that. Our family is her family." He admits to being nervous when they first met. "I wanted to make up for some of the things . . . but obviously, you can never make up for 19 years." Her last two years at Harvard, he began sending her a monthly stipend, which he continues to do despite her protests.

"She's special, and someday she'll do something incredible; I really believe that," says Morgan, 67. "Her mother gave her things that are priceless--a lot of love, and a love of reading."

She gave her daughter something else, too: the name "Summer." Elizabeth didn't want to keep her ex-husband's name, or use Morgan's name or her own maiden name since "I'm not a maiden." The year Lauralee was born, the Andy Williams song "A Summer Place" was a huge hit. Elizabeth took the name "Summer."

Both parents have read their daughter's book and love it, though her mother found parts of it painful. Today, Elizabeth lives on Social Security Disability benefits after being diagnosed with depression. Lauralee shares an apartment in a working-class Oakland neighborhood ("I feel more comfortable there") with her partner, Janice Obrzut. When she gets her degree, she hopes to teach English at a low-income public school, preferably in an alternative program like the one she attended at Quincy High.

As for her life, she says she wouldn't trade it for anyone else's. "I learned to look at the world in different ways and still find joy," she says. "Honestly, I think my life has been so lucky in so many ways."

This article originally appeared in the July 3, 2003 Boston Globe.
Reprinted with permission. © Copyright Globe Newspaper Company.

From Harvard Extension to Harvard College

In her book, Learning Joy from Dogs Without Collars (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2003) Lauralee Summer writes:

In late December, all my college applications were already sent in, and I went to an end-of-term dinner for my Harvard Extension class (The Dynamics of Psychology and Religion). It was at my professor's house in Cambridge.

I prepared two dishes--one was a Swedish recipe of yogurt, granola, and apple slices, and the other was an eggplant dish called ratatouille. I dressed in my favorite Christmas outfit, a red and green plaid dress that my mother bought at a yard sale and shortened to miniskirt length for me. I wore it with black stockings and combat boots, and my hair was dyed green to match. As I approached Professor Austin's house I was intimidated by its size and elegance. A wooden trellis, taller than I and covered with ivy vines, surrounded the house. I felt tiny and homemade in my little flannel dress, as if I were five years old, a shiny, apple-cheeked kindergartner meeting her teacher on the first day of school. I rang the doorbell that said, "Ring here for Dorothy Austin and Diana Eck." The other doorbell was labeled "Ring here for Erik Erikson." Upon seeing that, I was even more intimidated. We had read Erikson in class. He had been one of Freud's protégés and contemporaries. I felt like I had been invited to the house of someone who existed only in legend.

Professor Austin, whom everyone in our class called Dorothy, answered the door. Her beautiful silvery blond hair framed a big welcoming smile. She helped me take off my winter coat. The house was already buzzing with students. She took my dishes, exclaiming "How wonderful!" as she set them on the large mahogany dining table with the other food.

I began mingling with the students, all of whom were older--from early twenties to white-haired seventy-year-olds. At one point in the evening, when I was talking to Dorothy, she exclaimed that she hadn't known I was still in high school and was applying to colleges.

"Are you applying to Harvard?" she asked.

"No," I answered. "I don't think I would get in. And I don't think I'd fit in with the students." I thought Harvard was only for valedictorians and students who had taken calculus and all AP classes and who had never missed a day of school. Harvard was not for me.

"Oh, no, you must apply." She assured me that Harvard was a diverse place and that, although it was known best for its long-standing traditions, it was also a place where all kinds of people thrived. "You can pick up an application tomorrow." She focused her gaze upon me and said, "I'm going to introduce you to my roommate, Diana. She's the chair of Harvard's Comparative Religion Department." She vanished upstairs for a moment and returned with Diana. I had taken several courses in world religions at the Extension School and was interested in being a religion major.

In fact, Lauralee Summer had taken nine courses at the Harvard Extension School through the Lowell Scholarship Program, earning A's and B's in every one. And while she rarely spoke up in her World Religions class of 130 students, instructor Christopher Queen recalls that her green hair and rapt attention shone forth from the sea of faces. "We all knew that Lauralee was special," says Dean Queen today.

Photo reproduced with permission of Globe Newspaper Company, Inc.