The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-09-03
GRAY HEADS AT COLLEGE.
Full-Grown Men Not Uncommon

Full-Grown Men Not Uncommon Among Freshmen These Days.
 'It is remarkable" said a man who will go back to college as senior next month. ''how many full grown men there are in the colleges to-day.
 T have compared notes with fellows from other colleges, and find that it is quite common to see freshmen with gray hair, who will never see his thir- ty-fifth and possibly his fortieth birth day again. They are chaps for the most part who wish to take special course or two, or if they start out with the idea of getting degree they usual uy give it up and either disappear or devote themselves to one or two branch es.
 .In the technical schools you will l find full-groWn men boning up on one or two lines, men who are doing well in their business, but feel the lack of coll lege training, and have the idea that they can do much better after year or. so of study. Of course hundreds of men feel this way, but only small per- centage of them have the grit to go to | college among men so much younger and sit side by side with them in the class room. Then, again, it is not every man who can afford to leave his busi- ness for such purpose.
 Tt is very strange to see these men at work, to note their struggles to master the days lessons. It has surprised me many times to see men who have done we'll in their business struggling over a lesson which came as easy as pie to us youngsters. It is one of the best illus trations of the wonderful difference be- tween youth and even early middle life that expect ever to have presented to me.
 i II know one man who entered college when over thirty and brought with him l his wife and two small children. He \ had no money to speak of and was de- I termined to get full college education, classical. His wife was a plucky little woman and she was right there at his elbow at every stage of the game
 This was in a small New England college. The mans wife opened an eat I ing club and the man looked after the sI business end of it. How that woman looked after the two babies and ran I that club. don't know, but she did. She was wonderful cook, and soon the club had a reputation all through the town, and the other eating club folks began to say unkind things of this man and his wife But they lived 1t all down.
 "The man had fierce time of it keep I ing in the class for the first year. Half a dozen professors advised him to quit, but he hung on and won out. By the end of the sophomore year he hadn't a condition, and he graduated with his class. He wasn't at the bottom of the list, either. He got his college educa- \ tion and supported wife and two chill dren while he was doing it.
 When I was a freshman a certain man came to college with his son. The boy took full academic and the father was a special The father was bust ling business man. and have often wondered how they ever let him come even as special.
 .He would make the funniest of breaks in recitation. Fortunately for the boy, he and his father were in diff ferent classes. The father was a good ] fellow, though, and when he realized what the bull was that he had made lie would laugh as loud as any one.
 "He had any amount of rocks, but was as simple and as unaffected as a child over it. He seemed to enjoy noth- I ing so much as being in room full of thoroughly good fellows, although he never lost his dignity, and he never went anywhere near the carousing gang. He only stayed a year, and with in a year after that he died. When they opened his will they found he'd left tl two or three hundred dollars to the col I ege."--New York Sun.
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