“When I made that A in nutrition class, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try another one.’ ”

In her high school yearbook, Rachel Rice’s classmates in Alabama predicted that she would be a lawyer. But, after graduation during the Depression, she got a job. Forty years after high school she started college, and tomorrow she will graduate from Los Angeles Mission College. She lives in Tujunga with her husband, Joe.

After the children married and left home, the walls began to close in on me. Everybody was gone, my husband was gone all day, and I was here by myself. I needed to get out. I shopped a lot, but I got so tired of shopping I didn’t know what to do. I said, “There’s got to be more to life than this.” So, when a friend asked me to go to a nutrition class with her about six years ago, I took her up on it.

In the beginning I wasn’t even going to take the class for credit. I was just going to sit in the class and learn what I could. The teacher talked me into registering for the class. She said, “You’re going to be here, so you might as well get the credit.” She was very good with people like that. I may not sound timid, but I was very timid then. She encouraged me, and I needed that.

I thought nutrition had to do with food and your weight, but we had to study the whole body, from your head to your toes. I didn’t know we had pumps inside us. That was new to me. I never studied so hard in my life. I studied anywhere from 12 to 14 hours a day. My husband would do the laundry for me sometimes, because I’d get behind. I even went to church one Sunday night with a book because we were going to have a test. But I made an A on the test and an A in the class. There were three of us who got As.

The next semester I registered for a marriage and family class. That’s the one I remember most. Then I went to a gerontology class. I’d been going to class three years, just taking things I thought I would like from the catalogue. I never thought about getting a degree until one day my teacher said, “You know, you probably have enough credits to graduate.” And I said, “Well, I bet I could.” I didn’t have quite enough, so I got busy and got them. Now I have about 70 credits.

I was in class with children--or to me they were children. Some of them were 17. One boy hadn’t even graduated from high school when he started college. In fact, he’s graduating with me. He was on the dean’s list, and I was on the president’s list. In Sunday school they separate you by age. But in college you learn with youngsters right out of high school. If they thought anything about my gray hair, they didn’t do anything about it. I thought they were neat. Now, some of them weren’t there to study, but most of them were.

I was an only girl with three brothers, and my mother loved boys. I was always in the background. It’s like, “You’re a girl, what can you do?” I never thought I was worthless, but I never thought I was a smart person either, by any stretch of the imagination.

When I was raising our three boys, I never thought I was capable of college work. I never thought I was that smart. I didn’t think I could do the work. I found out that it takes a lot of study for me. I’m an achiever. If I start something, I want to make the very best of it. When I made that A in nutrition class, I thought, “Well, I’ll try another one.” So that’s what I did, and I made an A in that one. I worked too hard to think it was a fluke.

I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m going to do now. My husband doesn’t want to retire here. He is an electrician. We may move to San Diego. I don’t like retirement. I think it’s the worst thing in the world a man can do. There are too many who die right after they retire. You take someone who’s worked 40 years, and all of a sudden he retires. He doesn’t have a job to go to in the morning; his routine is completely changed. Unless you have something to retire to, you’re in trouble. It’s like the way I felt when the kids left home. I felt more or less that nobody needed me anymore.