NEVER TOO LATE

Lola Ide believes in finishing what she starts.
She started college in 1941 at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. “After two years, I wanted to get married,” Ide said. “There were no grants or student aid then, so when a woman got married, she left school so that her husband could stay in school.”
But that wasn’t the end of her college education. Now 85, Ide is the oldest student enrolled at Pittsburg State University.
“Over the years, if we lived where there was a college or university, I’d take some courses,” said Ide, widow of the Rev. Conrad Ide. “I never wanted to stop learning.”
She also kept very busy.
“I spent a major part of my life raising nine children,” she said. “After they were grown, I did work. I worked 10 years in the psychiatric unit at Mt. Carmel Regional Medical Center, and really enjoyed it. When I started I was a psychiatric aide, and by the time I retired in 1987 we were called mental health assistants. It was really a rewarding job.”
She made the decision around two years ago to go back to school.
“Some of my children and I went back to my old alma mater, and we had a wonderful time,” Ide said. “They had gotten out some old yearbooks with my picture in them, and the woman in the registrar’s office asked if I’d thought about going back to finish my degree. I said, ‘But don’t you think I’m too old?’
Then her children asked her the same question.
“I said again, ‘Don’t you think I’m too old to go back to college?’ Well, they did not,” Ide said. “So I enrolled at PSU in 2006, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. I think the first course I took was Human Relations in the Workplace.”
She said her original major, back in 1941, was speech and drama.
“That didn’t make sense any more, because I’m not planning on having a career,” Ide said. “Now I’m a general studies major. I’m a junior, close to being a senior.”
She’s taking her time with her studies.
“I can’t take a full load,” she said. “During the winter I usually take online classes because it’s so hard to get out in bad weather. I usually take a couple of classes on campus in the spring and in the summer. I love the summer semester because it’s so concentrated and the classes are smaller. You really get to know each other in a small class.”
Right now she’s taking a class on death and dying, taught by Dr. Julie Allison.
“That might sound gloomy, but it’s really very interesting,” Ide said. “We’re studying different cultures.”
She said she hopes to get her degree “in not too many more years. But I’m doing this because I enjoy it and because I want to finish what I start. It wouldn’t be any fun if I pressured myself.”
When she’s not studying, Ide does some volunteer work at Wesley House, works one day a week in the office of Community Hospice, and takes care of the library at St. John Lutheran Church, which was pastored by her late husband.