Massachusetts Girl Graduates From Homelessness to Harvard : Adversity: Lauralee taught herself to read at age 4, turning to books to cope with life in shelters and welfare hotels.

QUINCY, Mass. — The lights jolted her awake every 6 a.m. From her cot, she watched people in the Salvation Army shelter brace for another day. Then fourth-grader Lauralee Summer would sit up and open her books.

Alone with her words: In a vagabond childhood, fatherless and sometimes homeless, this was a familiar, comforting place for Lauralee.

She’d taught herself to read from a “See & Say” book she bought with fourth birthday money. As she and her mother moved among shelters and welfare hotels in three states, she turned to library books for solace.

This fall she’ll be able to read in a room of her own--at Harvard University, which has extended a full scholarship to the 17-year-old Quincy High School senior.

Any chance Harvard is taking with Lauralee is overcome by the chance provided her.

“It’s very rewarding to see Harvard pick up someone like Lauralee,” said Charlie MacLaughlin, a Quincy High administrator. Harvard will “traditionally get the best of the best, but they tend to fit into that category of having the Harvard personality, and she is so different.”

MacLaughlin is director of the high school’s Heritage Program, which offers an alternative for dropouts, disciplinary problems and students such as Lauralee, who don’t fit into a traditional school setting.

It’s not that she’s a rebellious or indifferent student. Lauralee ranks 15th in her 292-member class, which graduated last Monday, and scored a top-notch 1460 on her SAT exams.

Not a naturally gifted athlete, she nonetheless runs distance races on the track team and, as Quincy’s second female wrestler, won two matches against boys in the 112-pound weight class last winter.

She dyes her fair hair purple and wears a nose ring. She plays the violin--in the school’s concert band because it has no orchestra, taking the parts written for oboe.

She tutors grade school children and does volunteer work for Amnesty International. She spent last summer in Florida with a church group, rebuilding homes for victims of Hurricane Andrew. She plans to study comparative religion at Harvard.

What’s remarkable, considering such a resume, is that Lauralee spent most of her rootless childhood feeling alienated from classmates and bored by lessons she considered irrelevant. But she seems not in the least angry or arrogant.

“She’s just a different character,” MacLaughlin said. “A very gentle, sincere personality. She’s very humble and doesn’t view herself as being as spectacular as I do.”

In a one-on-one conversation, Lauralee is shy, ill-at-ease with praise, hesitant describing her stays in shelters.

It’s in written words that she best finds her expression--in quotes from the Bible and from poet Emily Dickinson that hang in her room, or an essay she wrote for her college application:

“I learned that wealth is not what I have; rather it is who I am. Being poor, being homeless, having my startled eyes opened to blinding lights and long rows of metal cots from which so many strangers were arising, these were not disadvantages but blessings, because they taught me more about myself.”

Lauralee credits her mother and faith in God with motivating her to overcome a deprived, sometimes cruel, childhood.

Elizabeth Summer was divorced, jobless and homeless in Santa Rosa, Calif., when Lauralee was born in November, 1976. They went to Oregon to be near relatives, including Summer’s four other children, and moved frequently as Summer, then 36, sought work as a nurse’s aide.

Lauralee has sweet memories of sitting on her mother’s lap listening to stories.

“She was about 20 months old when I began reading to her every single night,” said Summer, who recalls a well-thumbed book of nursery rhymes. “I read the same book every night. That was the only book we had.”

Lauralee’s childhood also included homeless shelters in Phoenix and Santa Barbara, Calif.

“I never had to sleep on the street,” Lauralee said. “I didn’t feel threatened at all. I think I was too young to really think about it. My mom was mostly always with me.”

At age 10, Lauralee tried fourth-grade classes in two Santa Barbara schools, then basically quit, opting to read to herself at the shelter.

“I hated school. I hated it because I didn’t know anyone,” she said. “I felt like school had no meaning for me, because it was like, ‘Why do I want to learn about that when my life is so strange?’ ”

Back in Oregon where Summer found work, Lauralee still felt out of place with peers. She retreated again into books, sometimes borrowing so many from the library that her mother couldn’t see her head above the wobbly stacks.

“I felt like I was separated from everyone,” Lauralee said. “They accepted me and everything, but I just felt like I knew so many different things than them, that they were so innocent.”

In her essay, Lauralee describes her mother as “a dreamer with many castles in the air, but few foundations beneath them.” But the dreamer was looking out for the daughter.

Aware of Massachusetts’ array of colleges, Summer came to believe that her daughter would get a better education on the other side of the country. The two arrived by bus in October, 1989.

First stop was a Boston homeless shelter, then a room in a welfare hotel. Lauralee spent three months in a foster home when Summer took a live-in job caring for a paraplegic.

Then, as part of a church program, the Summers had supper at the Quincy home of Marion Stout. In 1990, she invited them to move in. They still live there.

“When Lauralee first came here,” Stout said, “she was crying and saying, ‘I just want a place where I can get mail sent.’ ”

In time, the mail brought Harvard’s acceptance letter, now framed on the dining room wall.

With college in the offing, Lauralee has another quest, to contact her father. He is a man of some stature whose identity Lauralee and her mother do not want revealed. Summer has had no contact for years, and Lauralee has never met him.

“I just want him to know I’m related to him,” Lauralee said, “that this is who I am and how I turned out.”