Scholar From Skid Row Charts a Brighter Future on His Graduation Day

Aside from being the oldest in his class, Clarence Jensen, age 55, differed from his fellow students at Adelphi Business College in another respect: He is homeless.

Jensen just completed the nine-month, $3,500 course with the aid of federal grants and loans obtained with the help of the downtown Los Angeles college. And he received straight A’s.

“Clarence is smarter than I am,” said George Sieber, his accounting instructor. “He ripped through 30 chapters of the book in no time.”

“I wanted to change my life,” Jensen explained Tuesday after stopping by the school to pick up his diploma. “And I want to get my family back together.”

Jensen said he has lived in Skid Row shelters since last April when a fire destroyed the Eagle Rock apartment he shared with his divorced daughter and her four children. The daughter moved in with friends and temporarily gave up her children to foster parents, he said.

“It’s just . . . it’s just too expensive for us to move into another apartment right now,” he said haltingly, his eyes watering. “We don’t have enough to pay the first and last month, and the cleaning fee and so on.”

Jensen brightened up when reporters asked to see his transcript, which listed A’s in such courses as accounting, business communications, business mathematics, record-keeping and typing.

“Some days his clothes didn’t look so good,” Sieber recalled, “but he kept as presentable as possible and he worked very hard. When he came to us, we gave him a test which indicated he had obvious potential. So we set about to find him help.”

Jensen, who will have to repay the college $2,500, said he studied four to five hours a day--”at McDonald’s, Winchell’s, libraries, parks, wherever,” he said.

He also found part-time jobs--”concrete-finishing, painting, patch-work, dry wall.”

As a youth, he attended one semester of junior college in Idaho, and, although he’d “always been pretty good with numbers,” he went into the concrete-finishing business with his father. But he developed lung problems “from all the silicone and dust I inhaled. My doctor said I better quit because I had high blood pressure and a rapid heart beat.”

There followed a stint with the post office and a try at sales work before he moved in with his daughter to help her raise her children.

His luck may be changing for the better now.

Sieber said a car agency may offer Jensen a position “in the $12,000-$15,000 range” where he would receive on-the-job training as a bookkeeper.

Asked how he felt, Jensen said, “Wonderful.”

To celebrate, he walked from the college to a nearby restaurant, where he treated himself to a cup of coffee.

A passer-by, puzzled by the crowd of reporters, photographers and cameramen following Jensen, called out, “What did he do?”

“He just finished college,” someone answered.