School Ties : Fixations: Robert Laurie gets his Associate of Arts degree tonight--some 28 years after first enrolling at Orange Coast College.

Two decades ago, the National Lampoon ran a fantasy story in which a fellow woke up one morning and found he was 10 years old again, though with a head full of adult memories. He went to school and tried to cope, but that day the teacher gave the class the oral assignment of describing what they were going to do when they grew up.

Other kids related brief, linear tales of becoming firemen or going to school to study for a medical career. When it came to this guy, he just blurted out his life story, how he was going to drop out of college, sell aluminum siding and then tumble through a succession of unrelated jobs, have a divorce or two, and on and on. “Well, that’s not being very realistic,” commented the teacher.

Unlike that story’s protagonist, Robert Laurie is graduating from college--this evening in a commencement ceremony at Orange Coast College, in fact--but the convoluted course he’s taken before donning his cap and gown is a similar lesson in how unpredictable our lives often turn out to be.

The first wrinkle evident in Laurie’s road is the fact that he is getting his Associate of Arts degree some 28 years after first enrolling at OCC. He actively attended there for 14 of those years. Since OCC is a two-year campus, it required some fancy footwork for his graduation to take so long.

The tall, blue-eyed, graying-blond bearded 46-year-old said: “All told, I have 160 units--109 earned at this campus--and you only need 60 to graduate. But I started as a math major, then had photography and cinematography as majors, then into psychology then philosophy then finally the fine arts. So I gathered little piles of units specific to those areas.”

That was during the years when life didn’t get in the way of educational obstructions like the Army and work. Things like making wax dummies and growing kiwi fruit. *

We were talking last Thursday at an outdoor table on the campus, where a relaxed, summertime mood always seems to prevail. You could easily believe that some of the students majored in Frisbee. At one local high school, Corona del Mar, OCC has customarily been referred to as Big Corona, implying both that the campus is like high school and like the local beach of the same name.

For Laurie, the high school connection may have seemed even more direct, since his alma mater, Costa Mesa High, is just across the street from OCC. (One sign of the times: The high school officials refused to graduate him unless he got a haircut.) He already knew the campus well when he enrolled in 1965.

As far as school officials can tell, he is the only student to have been enrolled there in four separate decades. He doesn’t anticipate getting teary-eyed at the graduation ceremony, because he supposes he’ll continue occasionally taking classes there all his life. (His wife is also enrolled in a course, and she and their two children will be in a campus production of “South Pacific.”) In the meantime, he’ll be attending Cal State Long Beach, with the ultimate goal of coming back to OCC to teach.

To him, it’s the ideal setting.

“The campus atmosphere and life is one I find most enjoyable,” he said. “The youth factor has always been stimulating. I find the access to knowledge tremendous, the number of experts in so many fields you can go talk to. I think at UCI or other campuses there’s going to be more tension in the schooling. Not everybody is coming here to get a degree, so you don’t have that tension where everybody’s pushing for that. This is a little more laid-back.

“And faculty doesn’t have the pressure to publish. In each area I’ve studied here, each teacher really inspires me into the subject. They’re all very devoted, I find, and maybe because they don’t have that pressure to publish they’re freer to spend time on classes.”

Laurie is about as cheerful a poster boy for continuing education as any campus could ask for.

“I’ve always enjoyed school, and I do work hard at it, keeping at least a 3.5 average. I would say to anybody that it’s never too late to learn. It seems to me that either total ignorance or total knowledge is bliss, and anything else falls short. So as long as you have a little knowledge, you might as well go on gathering as much as you can trying toward that total,” he said.

*

Laurie was born in Vancouver, B.C., and moved to Orange County when he was in his teens. Though he was drafted into the U.S. Army after his first year at OCC, his Canadian citizenship kept him from being sent to Vietnam. “Instead they kept me in Georgia, which was fairly close to being overseas at the time,” he quipped.

After his two-year hitch, he returned for a semester, then took off to travel in Europe and the Middle East for two years--”There was this stigma of being the Ugly American then, but the closer you said you lived to Disneyland, the more they wanted to know you.” Then followed another stint of school, after which a marriage took him to Florida. Then it was back for a semester before he took a two-year job sculpting copies of the wax dummies at Buena Park’s Movieland Wax Museum for a sister museum in Orlando, Fla.

“I felt sort of like a mad scientist,” he commented. “I’d work until the middle of the night in a big warehouse with wax body parts laying everywhere, assembling these various movie stars. It really helped me develop my sculpting skills, working at least 10 to 12 hours a day sculpting figures from head to toe.”

Here, Laurie answered a question that has probably occurred to many of us: Just how anatomically correct are these life-sized wax figures?

“Well, anything that’s going to be covered up you don’t put that much time into. You just create the general shape, a bit more than Barbie or Ken have. Since we never did nudes, the closest you’d come would be a Spartacus or Ben Hur where the male chest area might be showing and need detail there.”

*

After his time at the waxworks, he returned to OCC for yet another semester, then moved to San Francisco and opened a bookstore with his second wife. Following that he grew kiwi fruits on a farm north of Sonoma, got divorced, and went back to school again.

His most recent spate of schooling resulted from being laid off his job of 11 years as a floor designer for a carpet firm. His wife, Cathy Ann, who had been home raising their two daughters, took a job--she’s a music and movement specialist with Orange County Head Start--and he decided to go for his art degree.

Now when he’s done with his classes, he picks his children, ages 10 and 11, up from theirs. Despite the fiscal difficulties in doing so, he and his wife have always felt one parent should be home with their children.

Along with the four art-heavy courses he took this past semester to finish his degree, Laurie’s classes have spanned the campus, from archery to astronomy. “Getting this degree is really a latter development. Before it was just a matter of enjoying taking classes,” he said. He finds now that all his campus experiences find a place in his art, the subject he hopes to come back and teach on campus in a few years.

*

Of the campus he’s frequented for nearly 30 years, Laurie says: “It has stayed pretty much the same. There’s only been a few new buildings added. The biggest difference is there were only about 6,000 students then (now there are nearly 28,000).

“As far as attitude, in the mid-’60s there was a little bit of political-ness going. Ralph Nader came to speak here. The SDS was here. The concerns then were a little bit more on the social direction we were taking at the time. When I came here I think there was a little more openness and a little stronger play between the various political factions. Now there are so many students there isn’t quite the give and take or camaraderie there was then.

“But I would probably say the big difference between now and then is the shorts. In the ‘60s you saw very little of shorts around campus at all, now the majority of people are wearing them,” he noted. Though he never much pictured himself in a cap and gown when he enrolled 28 years ago, Laurie is mildly enthused about the graduation ceremony finally taking place tonight.

“I figured after this many years and all the effort invested, it would be a nice event to partake in,” he said.