This family’s togetherness is a matter of degrees.

Like most college graduates, Karen Leatherwood posed for commencement pictures with her parents last week. But unlike most parents, Marilyn and Charles Leatherwood also were wearing mortarboards and gowns.

The three San Pedro residents, who all graduated with honors, received their associate’s degrees from Los Angeles Harbor College Thursday.

“We hadn’t really planned . . . that we all three would graduate at the same time. It wasn’t something we even thought about,” said Charles, a field service manager at Pacific Bell.

Karen, 20, said that graduating from college is “a big part of life, and I think it’s special that I get to do it with my parents.”

Charles, 50, and Marilyn, 45, attended classes full time for the past 2 1/2 years, going one night a week and 10 hours each Saturday. They were in every class together, but never shared a course with Karen, who attended day classes.

Charles and Marilyn said they felt somewhat competitive toward each other, but never with their daughter. Marilyn graduated with a 3.9 grade-point average, Charles with a 3.7 and Karen with a 3.2.

“It’s something I always wanted to do since I graduated from high school, and just one thing or another kept getting in the way,” said Marilyn, a senior executive secretary at Logicon Inc.

Before going to college full time, Marilyn had been taking one class per semester. “That was obviously going to take forever, so I decided to bite the bullet and get it over with,” she said. “I was a little apprehensive about it. It was a lot of hard work. Your life pretty well gets put on hold for a while.

“It was worth it.”

Charles and Marilyn said they hope their graduations will prove to other people who have been out of school for a while that it is possible to go back and get a college degree.

Karen, who worked part time during college, said: “It’s hard for me, but my parents work (full time) and have the house and all us kids. . . . Even when they were in school and as hard as they were working, they were always supportive of me. . . . I’m proud of them that they could do that. . . . It also gave me an idea of how much work it would be for me to go back to school.”

The Leatherwood’s youngest daughter, Lisa, 19, also attends Harbor College, and their oldest, Cheryl Stannovich, 23, graduated last year from the University of Redlands.

Marilyn and Charles plan to get their bachelor’s degrees in business management from the University of Redlands and will begin attending extension courses--full time--in Torrance on Thursday.

Karen will return to Harbor College for the fall semester and then go to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in January to work toward a bachelor’s degree in business administration in marketing. Then she plans to go for her third degree: a master’s in international marketing.