At 77, He Wants to Be a Credit to His Dad

Eddie Felix has a story to tell, but I sensed I wasn’t getting all of it. Something just didn’t track.

Not that I didn’t like the story, which goes as follows:

Like many boys of his generation, Felix joined the war effort when he graduated from high school in June 1944. By the end of September, he was in the Philippines. Back in Los Angeles in 1946, he enrolled first in junior college and then in what is now Loyola Marymount University. In 1950, married and a father, he dropped out, 18 credits short of graduation.

He immersed himself in the gigantic pool of young postwar Americans who went to work, raised families and laid the foundation of contemporary society. Felix and his wife, Kay, raised six children, and he eventually made good money as a vice president for an electrical wholesaler. He retired in 1994, and, you’d think, had done pretty much everything a guy needed to have done.

But, oh, those loose ends.

So, in January 2003, Felix re-enrolled at Loyola to pick up where he’d left off 53 years earlier. He was 76.

He’s taken two classes in each of the last three semesters -- one from home and the other after making the 43-mile trip from his Villa Park home. On May 8, he’ll graduate with the class of 2004, three days before his 78th birthday.

Not the rarest of stories, but it makes me wonder: Here’s a guy who built a life, didn’t need a sheepskin to do it and doesn’t need one now.

Why?

A low-key guy, Felix says it wasn’t a burning issue; nor had there been an epiphany. He just decided to do it. “If something comes to my mind that I think should be taken care of, that’s the type of person I am,” he says. “I made up my mind I was going to do it and had determination to do it and knew I could do it.”

OK, but I can’t help thinking as we talk there had to be more to it than he’s letting on. Almost like a mystery I hadn’t cracked.

But all I get is interesting stuff on how weird it felt for him to be sitting in a class “with all my grandkids” and how their clothing styles are “completely off the wall” and how he wondered what a syllabus was. And how he at first felt overwhelmed with the requirements for reading and essay-writing and how in the world, with 54 years of marriage in the books, he got a C in a class on marriage.

I press on. Why, with his age and the commute and minus a compelling need, did he insist on graduating? He fumbles a moment, then says, “I don’t think I ever quit anything,” he says. “It just didn’t feel right, I guess. It was something I wanted to do. It was a pride thing, a real fulfillment for me.”

Fair enough, but ... why? I call Chris Felix, his 52-year-old son, to see how the family feels about Eddie’s achievement. And then it all becomes clear.

“His father was a typical taskmaster,” Chris Felix says, “a tough customer and very demanding of my father. He died in 1996; he was 96 years old, and it had probably been less than 10 years before that when I was visiting him and he was complaining then that my dad never finished college.”

Are you telling me, I ask Chris Felix, that your dad, while in his 60s, was still dancing to his father’s tune? “There’s no doubt,” Chris Felix says.

“I think this closes the loop,” Chris Felix says of his father’s graduation. “It was one of the things he wanted to do, tried to do and circumstances got in the way, like they did for how many hundreds of thousands of others? I think this is more of personal satisfaction of being able to look up in the sky and say to his old man, ‘Pop, I finally did it.’ ”

Now it all makes sense. Still his father’s son at 78, Eddie Felix will make himself and his father, who didn’t get past sixth grade, proud. I ask what he’ll do with the diploma.

“We have a special frame for it,” he says, “and we’ll put it up on the wall somewhere.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.