Schools : Woman to Graduate After Dropping Out at 15--65 Years Ago

After 79 years as daughter, mother, grandmother, homemaker and seamstress, Jennie Sartori decided to do something just for herself.

She went back to high school.

Tonight, Sartori will march down the aisle at Alhambra High School with 140 other graduates of the district’s adult school to receive the diploma she always yearned for after she dropped out in 1929.

The second of six children, Sartori left Lincoln High School when she was 15 to earn money for her family, working in a Downtown Los Angeles garment factory. She married and raised two children, then helped raise five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Still, she said, that wasn’t enough. “I felt there was something missing from my life.”

She enrolled last fall in Alhambra’s adult program, dutifully attending classes in the single room that serves as an entire school for students mastering math, English, science, history and other subjects required to graduate.

“I was there rain or shine,” she said. “The whole semester, I only missed two days. I figured I didn’t have much time to waste. Even if it was hard, and I was exhausted mentally, I loved it.”

Sartori drew her own experience into the classroom, writing essays on her work in the Depression-era garment industry, or on the Sicilian village from which her parents hail and which she has visited three times. There, residents speak Albanian interchangeably with Italian.

“I like history and social studies and writing,” she said. “But when it came to math, I thought, ‘Oh, dear.’ But it’s kind of fun to master it.”

And master it she did, said Teresa Strople, an instructional aide with the program. “She asked us, ‘Are you just grading me easy because of my age?’ And we said no. We just graded her off the scores. She was getting 100s.”

A much younger student, Terry Galvan, marveled, “I give her a lot of credit. I just wish more elderly people would come back.”

Although Sartori said that as a young woman she was too weak and sickly to complete her degree through night school, her irrepressible energy at the age of 80 belies that. Buoyant and animated, she travels regularly and takes a keen interest in world affairs.

A photo of Sartori taken during the Gulf War shows her holding a banner reading: “Don’t Send Our Grandchildren to a Needless War.”

The photo was taken by her grandson, a photographer for the Reuters news service who was assigned to cover an anti-war protest in Downtown Los Angeles.

“My grandson, Lee, was taking photos, and he said ‘Grandma! What are you doing here?’ I said I came by myself. . . . There was a mob of college kids all protesting. So I joined the protesters.”

With school over and graduation approaching, Sartori feels a certain emptiness.

“I feel lost not coming to school,” she said. “My youngest girl (age 50) says, ‘Now that you’re in the swing of learning, why don’t you go to college?’ And I think that sounds great!”