Mark Butterman '76
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- Mark ButtermanMark: Ok, my name is Mark Butterman and I currently live in Denver, Colorado. And I am a member of the Grinnell College class of 1976. And I want to relate two short vignettes that describe in summary detail how Grinnell changed me almost immediately once I got here.The first was really more a social situation. I came from a fairly wealthy Chicago suburban high school called New Trier, graduating in 1972. I was listening to the right rock and roll music and wearing all the right clothes and had all the right posters and thought that I was pretty hip. And my freshman roommate, Perry Colvin, was
- Mark ButtermanMark: from South Carolina and his father owned the local Dairy Queen in a small town in South Carolina. I remember when I was dropped off at the dorms by my parents and my brother and I met my freshman roommate. I remember my brother many years later telling me many years later that the look on my face was something to behold because I thought Perry was the squarest, most uncool, you know, dopey guy I had ever met. Within the space of a few months, I really learned to appreciate him and realize that not everybody travelled in the same kind of world that I did and the fact that if you did not like
- Mark ButtermanMark: the Rolling Stones, didn’t much matter to describe what kind of person you are and what your value systems are. It really changed my whole perception of the world and started making me understand how narrow a path I had actually travelled and look at my own value system and start saying some of the things that I think are right and cool and hip are really just such BS. So, that was sort of happening socially. Then at the same time, another thing that occurred on a more academic plane was that I had gone to high school where it was a little bit like what Garrison Keillor says, where all the children were above average. You know, everybody
- Mark ButtermanMark: at my high school was wonderful, everybody got As and you were God’s gift to mankind because if the teachers didn’t grade you appropriately, the parents came and made sure they did. So everybody was above average. So, I didn’t know really, what a terrible writer, organizer and thinker I was until I came into Grinnell and wrote my first three-page paper for I think the class at the time was called “European History 1789 to the Present,” taught by Don Smith. When I got my first written three page paper back, there was actually more red ink on that paper than there was black ink from having typed that paper on a type writer.
- Mark ButtermanMark: So, I was really dismayed. I just did not understand what I had done wrong. I remember summoning up the temerity to go and see Professor Smith and talk to him about my paper. Something I probably would not have ever have dreamed of doing in high school. He was very welcoming, and he sat down with me at his office and we reworked that paper. We organized it, and I think he might have spent as much as maybe three to four hours with me that day writing my three page paper. I walked out of there exhausted, realizing that maybe I was not above average and that maybe that I had a lot of
- Mark ButtermanMark: work to do—but also that it may be a challenge and fun to produce the kind of work that would satisfy a really inquisitive, demanding mind. And so I remember writing my second paper, another three page paper, on something pretty simple and getting the same exact results. I don’t know how Don Smith managed to do it but he managed to keep me fully engaged and wanting to keep making my writing assignments better and not give up and it wasn’t, you know, probably until my senior year when I was taking, you know, British History II or whatever that I actually was turning papers that, you know, kind of
- Mark ButtermanMark: met his standard. But, it wasn’t until many, many years later that I realized that somebody had actually devoted such a tremendous amount of time to helping me organize my thoughts, articulate my ideas, to organize them on paper, to present them in a coherent fashion so that the reader could understand them and not have to worry about my vague pronouns, my lack of clarity in writing and you know that is something that has just absolutely been a godsend to me since then. I’m now a lawyer, I’m the general counsel of a company headquartered in Denver and it is absolutely essential that I be able
- Mark ButtermanMark: to communicate clearly and concisely to people who have little time and want to get right down to the important issues right away. I really learned that here, I didn’t learn that in law school, I didn’t learn that anywhere else, I learned it here and I learned it from Don Smith.
Alumni oral history interview with Mark Butterman '76. Recorded June 4, 2010.