A Great Graduate

As sure as there is college graduation, there is the annual raft of tales of heroic graduates. These seasonal sagas of plucky undergraduates who have triumphed over adversity are all well and good, Mary Fasano believes. It simply never would occur to her to include herself among them.

Never mind that this 4-foot-10-inch great-grandmother of 18 is claiming her bachelor’s degree at 89 years of age. Or that the institution granting Fasano her diploma happens to be Harvard University. Or that the sheepskin bearing her name as well as Harvard’s legendary “Veritas” logo was 17 years in the making.

This is no poster person for geriatric accomplishment, Mary Fasano wanted to make perfectly clear. This is a woman who promised herself she would get an education when her parents pulled her out of eighth grade and sent her to work in a Rhode Island cotton mill. And this is a woman who made good on that vow.

“I did this for me,” said Fasano, who still lives behind the diner here that she managed with her late husband, Arcangelo, for the better part of five decades. “You see, I had a terrible inferiority complex. I didn’t think I was equal to other people because I didn’t have an education. Then I went to high school”--at 69--”and I felt much better.”

High school was so rewarding that Fasano decided to try college. She chose Harvard because it was right up the road, an easy commute aboard the “T,” this area’s rapid transit system. She enrolled in Harvard’s extension school, starting with a class in Italian culture--a way to learn about her heritage--and taking all her classes at night.

Very often, her 33-year-old advisor, Suzanne Spreadbury, said, Fasano rode the train home at 11 o’clock at night, “in January, in subfreezing weather. I was scared to death.” Fasano, however, was unfazed. She had endured worse indignities. When her parents made her leave school at 14, her favorite teacher came to her house and begged her mother and father to rethink their decision. They refused.

“I come from the Italian culture, and girls weren’t supposed to go to school at that time,” Fasano explained. Nevertheless, “I was very bitter about what happened.”

Mill work had its own humiliations. “I hated it,” she recalled. As if the physical demands of the job were not enough, Fasano and the other young female employees had to put up with male mill workers “who grabbed at us every time we walked by.”

But not for long. Fasano went after one groping male with a shuttle, and no one ever touched her again.

She married at 21 and spent most of her married life working the grill at Fasano’s, the family diner. Four of her five children have college degrees, “not a bad average.” To pay for their tuitions, she worked the 4:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift at the diner, then worked nights in a dress factory. After her husband died 20 years ago, the family sold the diner and opened a catering business. Fasano still works part time, making and wrapping sandwiches.

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College offered its own challenges. She concentrated in liberal arts and will graduate with a B average, her advisor said. Fasano aced math and foreign languages, Spreadbury added. But writing taxed her.

“In a diner, you speak. You don’t write,” Fasano said. Besides, “at the diner I was humble-like. I knew I didn’t have an education, and I never felt like I was the equal even of my own customers.” As a result, “It really was hard for me to learn about writing.” Still, she insisted, “I loved every minute of college, even the hard parts.”

She especially loved the satisfaction of traveling to Italy and realizing that because of her art history courses, she could identify the works of famous painters simply by looking at them. She turned the cathedrals into extensions of her college classrooms, applying what she had learned in architectural history to each basilica tour.

“You have no idea how satisfying that was,” Fasano said.

Fasano said she never stopped to notice the fact that she was so much older than her classmates. “In high school, some girls would look at me like, ‘Who is that old hag and why is she in school with us?’ I just ignored it. I was there to learn,” she said. “I have a mind of my own, and I have to do what I have to do. In this case, what I had to do was go to school.”

As for Harvard, where Spreadbury said the average extension student is about 32 years old, “We never spoke about age. I was there to learn. And boy, did I learn.”

Spreadbury said Fasano was more interested in improving her mind than in offering her tenacity as an inspiration to others. “Something was taken away from her when she was very young, and she was determined to get it back,” Spreadbury said. “She did want to overcome those feelings that she wasn’t smart enough. Going to college was her way of liberating herself. It had nothing to do with anybody else.”

Wearing her cap and gown, Fasano will address the Harvard Extension School’s June 5 graduation ceremony. The theme of her talk could also be the title of her life’s story: “Knowledge is power.”

Then it will be back to school. Fasano is planning a trip to Spain. “I think I’d better learn Spanish before I go, don’t you?”