  • Search
  • All content
  • Business listings

Marcia Bruton: Librarian helped save sea turtles

June 1, 2014|By Denise-Marie Ordway, Orlando Sentinel

Marcia Bruton loved helping people and believed in the power of education — reasons that her job as a longtime Orange County librarian was so fitting.

When she wasn't pressing the people around her to keep learning, she volunteered for programs that benefited children and wildlife, said her husband, David Bruton.

"She wanted everybody to read," he said. "She wanted everybody to love books."

Bruton, who lived most of her life in the Orlando area, died Monday after a heart attack at her home in New Smyrna Beach. She was 63.

Friend Cathy Thompson said she will be remembered for her work helping protect sea turtles as part of the New Smyrna Beach Marine Turtle Conservancy.

A few times a week during nesting season, Bruton patrolled the shore, looking for nests and building barriers around them for protection.

She and her daughter designed and created the turtle conservancy's website. Bruton, who served as treasurer for a time, also helped reorganize the group.

"Marcia brought it around to the 21st century," said Thompson, the conservancy's president.

Bruton also traveled the state for years, helping out with a program called Surfers For Autism, which introduces the sport of surfing to special-needs children.

Throughout her life, she was known for her persistence and hard work. When David Bruton started dating her in the late 1970s, she was a single mother of two small children working at the telephone company and taking evening classes at Rollins College.

She earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from Rollins in 1983. In the mid-1990s, she decided to pursue a dream of becoming a librarian by completing a master's degree in library and information science at University of South Florida.

She worked for the Orange County library system from 1997 to 2005. She started as a reference librarian and was promoted to assistant manager at the Alafaya Branch Library in east Orange, said Tracy Zampaglione, the library system's public-relations administrator. When she retired, she was a department head at the main library in downtown Orlando.

Throughout their marriage, David Bruton, a retired automotive-service technician, said his wife pressed him to keep learning. The couple were constantly enrolled in some course or seminar, including a class on paleontology at Rollins and a upholstering course offered through the Orange County school district.

Bruton even wrote to the Orlando Sentinel in 1995 to urge people to learn more words.

"A dictionary is a great teacher and social equalizer," she wrote. "The acquisition of an extensive vocabulary requires no money and little effort; neither a college degree nor professional status is necessary to have a well-developed command of the English language."

In addition to her husband, Bruton is survived by her son, R. William Blake of Indialantic; two daughters, Shannon Waite of Captiva and Jessica Bruton of Jacksonville; and two brothers, William G. Brewster of Wellington and Martin M. Brewster of Allentown, Pa.

Baldwin-Fairchild Funeral Home, Conway Chapel, Orlando, is handling arrangements.

dordway@tribune.com or 407-420-5470407-420-5470

Call Send SMS Add to Skype You'll need Skype CreditFree via Skype
Orlando Sentinel Articles
|
|
|
Please note the green-lined linked article text has been applied commercially without any involvement from our newsroom editors, reporters or any other editorial staff.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-06-01/news/os-obit-marcia-bruton-20140601_1_sea-turtles-rollins-college-library-system
articles.orlandosentinel.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-23
95443
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:235CDIMOSKFRBRPQTZAXAFUTCPJ2CD6A
<urn:uuid:77791fee-88d7-4f99-b82e-04b0b8aa23de>
2014-07-28T22:32:45Z
66.114.52.13
sha1:MA5LFYDHPIGUPKBJCQDD2Q2NLYZDDNF4
<urn:uuid:8a261aa6-b4b1-4bf4-abc1-19c5503f2896>
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-06-01/news/os-obit-marcia-bruton-20140601_1_sea-turtles-rollins-college-library-system
response
<urn:uuid:03b7f59e-1f8d-4322-9c5f-2caa4279a146>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-146-231-18.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-23
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for July 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf