MU dropout is now a proud grad at age 65
If life had gone according to plan, Joe Harding graduates from Marquette University in 1974 at age 21 and becomes a high school history teacher.
What really happened is that he lost interest during his senior year and dropped out.
“I got the blahs. I didn’t care anymore about school,” he told me.
I can relate. I quit Marquette after just one year, also in the 1970s, and became an auto mechanic for a while before eventually stumbling back into school at UWM.
But we’re not talking about me. With his transcript in shambles, Joe went back to the Philadelphia area where his family lived and took a job at a paper company alongside his father. He married a Marquette sweetheart and returned to Milwaukee two years later to work in a succession of sales job.
The years passed. Three kids. Two divorces. The way Joe tells it, jobs came easy, but not a career.
“All of a sudden I got this crazy idea,” he said.
That was three years ago. He asked Marquette if he could return and finish the history major he had started 45
years earlier. Come on back, they said.
“The funny thing is that when I decided to do this and go back to school, my son Ian was still at UW-Madison and my youngest Emmy was at UWM. So all three of us were in college at the same time,” he said. Ian and Emmy both finished in 2017.
And his older daughter, Casey, already had graduated from — guess where? — Marquette in 2007.
Joe walked onto campus in January 2016. It reminded him of showing up that first time in 1970 with a check from his dad for $1,066 to cover the first semester, a room at McCormick Hall and a meal plan. He enrolled back then under the Freshman Frontier Program, which meant Marquette was taking a chance on him even though his high school GPA wasn’t great.
But now he was in his 60s and feeling pretty self-conscious standing there with his backpack.
“My first reaction was, geez, these kids are going to think I’m this creepy old guy sitting in the corner. But it ends up that the students were great. I would say I made a couple of friends,” he said.
In one history class, students were remembering all the way back to when George W. Bush and Barack Obama were elected president. “It finally got to me and I said I remember President Kennedy getting shot. They all cracked up. To them, that’s like ancient history.”
Joe rejoined his old fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, but didn’t have much time for hitting the Marquette bars or tossing a Frisbee on the quad. He works full time at Home Depot near his Glendale home, so he would leave the store, attend daytime classes and then return to work or head home.
One of his co-workers likened him to Rodney Dangerfield in the 1986 movie “Back to School.” Dangerfield turned 65 that year, so it’s a fair comparison.
In the 1970s, Joe wrote papers by hand or on a typewriter. This time around, like the other students, he used a laptop that he carried to class.
One of his history professors, Jennifer Finn, who is 35, called Joe the light of her classroom.
“The students loved him and the perspective that he brought to historical issues,” she said. “I’m really proud of him for finishing what he started, and I can’t wait to shake his hand at commencement.”
That’s Sunday, by the way, and Joe will be there at the BMO Harris Bradley Center to pick up that elusive diploma. At age 65, he will be the oldest grad in the arena.
It took him five semesters to earn the 26 credits he needed, about two classes per semester.
And he got all A’s and B’s.
“It’s amazing what you can do if you go to every class,” he said, recalling how much he was skipping out back in the day.
Joe plans to stick with the job he likes at Home Depot, helping contractors get the supplies they need. The completion of college was an end in itself to prove he could do it.
As graduation approached, Joe did something he has never done before. He got a personalized Marquette license plate for his car to announce the bookend years of his academic pursuit. It says, “70TO18.”