This Grace Is Amazing/My Heroine

Read this story today & thought I'd share it. I'd truly love to
meet this lady.:)



Glasgow woman getting degree at age 82


The Associated Press
April 21, 2003 12:49 AM


GLASGOW, KY. -- Sixty-three years after Grace Vincent Hyde left college at the end of her freshman year, she is about to graduate from Western Kentucky University.

"I always wanted to get my degree," said Hyde, 82. "The core of it all is that I love learning."

Hyde's mother died when she was a child. She had been living with her aunt and uncle in Bowling Green when she entered what was then Western Kentucky State Teachers College in 1939.

Although she paid her own way through her first year of college, her uncle persuaded her to enroll in business school and then find a job.

She wound up working as a secretary at FBI headquarters in Washington, and then at the FBI office in Louisville.

Later, she married Gillie Hyde, whom she had known in their hometown of Brownsville. The two eventually settled in Glasgow, where Grace cared for their three children and helped with paperwork for the couple's auto dealership, Gillie Hyde Ford-Mercury.

Her husband died in 1983, and their son took over the business. Their two daughters had finished college and moved away.

In the early 1990s, she decided she needed to finish what she had started in 1939.

"I thought, 'How am I going to justify my living on this earth if I don't do something? I can't just sit around and watch television all day.'" said. "Then I hit upon this idea of getting a degree."

She since has been named to Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities, has a 3.79 grade-point average and is one of the darlings of the 1,900-plus-student Glasgow campus of WKU.

Judy Parker, an office associate of campus director Juanita Bayless, said she had several classes with Hyde over the years and Hyde's many life experiences lent themselves wonderfully to the classes.

"Grace may be 82, but it's only chronological," Parker said. "She seldom forgets anyone's name and is an extremely bright lady. She can be in a study group with kids who are straight out of high school and they'll treat her just like one of their own. Or she can fit right in with a group of non-traditional students in their 30s."

Hyde will receive a general studies degree during the May 10 commencement on WKU's main campus in Bowling Green.

She will miss no longer going to class on the Glasgow campus.

"Oh, it's so cool out there," she said. "We were sitting around before class one day, and three or four girls were talking about what they were going to do when they got their degrees. One of the girls looked over at me and said, in all seriousness, 'Are you going to try to get a teaching job when you graduate?' I think after she said it, it dawned on her what she had said."