Long Road To Oxford

To hear its residents tell it, the agricultural community of Watsonville, Cal. Isn't a very special town. Main Street is lazy in the daytime. Only a few small stores dot each side of the road. There is only one movie theatre, and for entertainment, Watsonvillers usually have to travel about 10 miles to Santa Cruz.

But racial tension seethes close to the town's tranquil surface. Thousands of migrant farm workers, mostly Chicano, are left unemployed each winter because it sometimes gets too cold to grow the apples and lettuce they pick for a living Chicano-Anglo animosity frequently bubbles over into violence, and even murder. For its size, the city has one of the highest crime rates in the country.

Watsonville High School has about 3000 students. Only a tiny percentage of the student body ever ends up graduating, and only a fraction of these individuals ever make it to college. Attending an Ivy League college is practically unheard of.

Brenda L. Buttner grew up in Watsonville. But she's an exception to the town's often unhappy rules. She's graduating from Harvard. And she'll be attending Oxford University next year on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Buttner's family is very poor. Her parents had to move first to Colorado and then to Reno. Nevada to find work, because nothing was left for them in Watsonville. She enjoys none of the luxuries many Harvard students take for granted Financial problems have daunted Buttner through out her Harvard career. To support herself, she's occupied a slew of jobs from secretarial work to telephone fundraising to narrating a national radio show to co-producing a local TV show, "Cambridge, USA."

Despite the struggle to make ends meet, Buttner his amassed a formidable set of accomplishments here. In addition to the Rhodes, she was president of the International Relations Council, secretary-general of a National Model United Nations Conference, and an executive news producer at WHRB.

The contrast between Harvard and Watsonville immediately impressed and delighted. Buttner when she arrived as a freshman. "I thought that it was incredibly exciting that people liked to talk about books. They read. I wasn't used to that I had to mask that side of me in high school."

Still, the well-heeled denizens of Harvard intimidated Buttner at first. "It was unnerving in the sense that I felt my past was unimportant. I didn't want to talk about it."

"There is some degree of subtle discrimination here. The people can't understand that there is a lifestyle different than their own. They assume that you pay someone to type your paper. They assume that you can go to a movie or go home for Christmas. They must know that for some people this isn't true," Buttner says.

Friends and co-workers express amazement at Buttner's determination.

Carrie Rosefsky '84, a member of the IRC Board of Directors, says that Buttner "has unbelievably strong personal convictions, an inner resolve and a belief in dedication to a task and hard work. She's graceful, poised, and articulate I here's a quiet self-confidence. It's not an abrasive quality, but an inner calm."

Jess Velona '83 co-produced a show with Buttner at WHRB. He says he was stunned by Buttner's drive and ability. "I've never understood how she did what she did It always seems to me that she never slept, because she was involved in running four or five different projects and doing them so well and all at the same time."

You still almost have to force Buttner to enumerate her achievements. She insists that she's not special. She scoffs at the "tags to riches" label.

I don't want people to think of me as some Horatio Alger or an example of the American dream. It's not a matter of my rising above the society from which I came. It's just a matter of my taking a different route, but that doesn't make me any better," Buttner says.

Only recently has Buttner abandoned her fears of attracting unwanted sympathy with her success story.

"I realized that my past was important to me and that I could talk about it when a friend this year asked me if my parents were lawyers," she recalls. "He assumed that I came from a very rich back ground. At that moment, I knew that I could be much more open about my life and that I could talk about my background I wasn't necessarily using it as a crutch."

Besides, Buttner emphatically denies that she is more successful than the majority of the students at Harvard. "The Rhodes Scholarship is very prestigious and well known, but that doesn't mean I'm more accomplished. Many people have spent just as much time as I did as president of the IRC by feeding the poor in Cambridge or organizing panel experts to speak on Latin America."

Buttner's modesty has not gone unnoticed.

"She's very warm for someone with so much talent," Velona says. "She has no intention of trying to impress you or show off. She's rather spend an afternoon telling you how great you are."

So Buttner has managed to overcome enormous obstacles and achieve the heights of collegiate success--while still maintaining a likeable personality. How does she do it?

"What keeps me going?" she laughs. "You forget that there are 24 hours in a day."