Woman, 83, to Get UCLA Degree She Worked for 62 Years Ago : Education: Florence Clifton, a Democratic activist and former state official, has done just fine without a diploma. But a cap and gown will cap her career.

She was a student at UCLA when it opened its Westwood campus.

It was 1929 and Florence Clifton had ridden in a parade of Model A’s and Auburns that rumbled down Sunset Boulevard, carrying the fledgling university’s 6,000 students from a temporary campus on Vermont Avenue to its new home in a dusty suburb west of town.

On Sunday, the Granada Hills woman will return to the campus. This time she’s going to pick up the diploma she missed out on the first time around.

Sixty-two years after dropping out of school a mere four units short of graduating, Clifton, now 83, will receive her bachelor’s degree in physical education.

“I was going to graduate in 1931--I was in my senior year. But I had to drop my afternoon classes that last semester to work a bit and help my folks,” Clifton recalled Monday.

“It was the middle of the Depression and my father had been laid off from the butter and cream company where he worked. My family had a mortgage, and I wanted to help them by working at whatever I could find. I told myself I would go back to school and finish as soon as I could.”

But Clifton never got the chance. She immersed herself in a series of low-paying jobs, feeling lucky to make 50 cents an hour or $2.67 a day wrapping shoes in a store. After that, she fell in love, married and began raising a family.

She became active in Democratic Party politics in the 1930s, worked as a wartime Rosie the Riveter on Lockheed P38s in the 1940s and was a successful insurance executive in the 1950s. She was named chief of the state’s Division of Industrial Welfare in the 1960s.

This year, Clifton decided to go back to college.

“When you get up in your 80s, you start looking back at what you’ve done--and what you wish you’d done,” she said.

Clifton was fully expecting to have to lug a knapsack full of textbooks into classes filled with students the same age as her great-grandchildren. She has 11 of them spread across the West Coast. One of her 14 grandchildren, Christopher Jordan-Smith, is also a UCLA student.

“DNA and a lot of other important things weren’t even discovered yet when I took physiology,” she said.

When officials dug her transcripts out of university archives, they discovered that half a dozen UCLA extension classes that Clifton took in the 1950s as part of her insurance business work qualified her to graduate retroactively.

Clifton has amazed UCLA officials, who will award degrees to about 5,000 other undergraduates in ceremonies this week.

“University counselors say this is the most unusual case they can remember for a person to get a retroactive degree,” said Harlan Lebo, a UCLA spokesman.

“I told them I had been looking forward to going back to class, “ Clifton said with a laugh. “They told me I could always enroll in graduate school if I really want to go back.”

The lack of a college degree never held Clifton back.

On Monday, her husband of 60 years, retired Municipal Court Judge Robert Clifton, pointed out framed photographs of his wife. One in the living room showed her as a U.S. delegate to a U.N. meeting in Geneva. A Life magazine photo above the stairway showed her chatting with Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Gahagan Douglas and former Gov. Culbert Olson.

Others picture her at a White House Conference on the Status of Women in 1964, working in Micronesia as a Peace Corps manpower specialist in 1968 and huddling with politicians and celebrities during decades of work as a political party volunteer.

“My wife is so beautiful,” said Clifton, 89, who gave her a gold UCLA ring as a fifth anniversary gift. “I’m so proud of her. Of course she’s always had the university education, she just didn’t have the degree.”

Known in California political circles as Susie Clifton, a nickname bestowed by her husband, she was a delegate to five Democratic National Conventions and helped run numerous political campaigns, including that of former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown.

Three of the Cliftons’ five children will attend Sunday’s ceremonies at Pauley Pavilion--named after the late Ed Pauley, a friend of Florence Clifton from her political fund-raiser days. “They only give the graduates four tickets each,” she said.

And her belated baccalaureate means Clifton can take something out of storage after more than 30 years. It’s a state Senate resolution honoring her Division of Industrial Welfare work that erroneously described her as a UCLA graduate. “Now it’s true.”