COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:Never too late to learn

Write if you get work.” You’ve heard it a thousand times. Do you know where it comes from?

Wait. Let me tell you. It’s from the Great Depression. As family members scattered on the four winds to find a job, any job, the ones left behind would remind them to write if they found anything so they could join them. John Steinbeck offered his version in “The Grapes of Wrath,” when Mama Joad kisses her son, Tom, goodbye and says, “Write when you find work.”

Where were we? I usually don’t get lost this early. Oh, yeah, I remember.

Finding work wasn’t the problem for Donnie Madril, a 48-year old Irvine man: It was the writing part that was the killer. Madril, who went to work in manufacturing right after high school, could read just fine, thank you, but his writing skills were somewhere between poor and nonexistent, a condition often ascribed to me I might add.

“I was never able to transfer my thoughts to paper,” Madril told the Daily Pilot. “It was real simple stuff; simple, small words. Fragments every place, no punctuation at all.”

Madril was a solid worker for 20 years but was passed over time after time because of his inability to write even the simplest sentence.

When his company relocated 10 years ago and left Madril behind, he took a job driving a truck, one of the few jobs he could find where his problems with pen or keyboard might go unnoticed.

Two years ago, Madril decided enough was enough and enrolled in a literacy program at Newport Beach Public Library. Not only did he do well, he knocked it out of the pen-and-paper park, with every comma, semicolon and exclamation point in exactly the right place.

On Thursday, Madril received the Rochelle Hoffman Award, which recognizes writing skills above and beyond the call of quotation marks as part of the Library’s Literary Services program.

“The transformation in his writing has been remarkable and totally impressive,” said Lauren Klein, Madril’s tutor.

“You have ultimately changed your life and enriched mine,” Klein said at Thursday’s ceremony. The award is named in honor of Rochelle Hoffman, who worked tirelessly in the Library’s literacy program as a tutor before dying in 2004. I say two thumbs up, at least, for, Rochelle Hoffman, Lauren Klein and, of course, Madril.

It did get me to musing, though. Is Madril, at 48, at the far edge of the fully grown adult-learner spectrum? As it turns out, not at all. As adult learners go, he’s a preschooler, more or less.

In 1986, a retired cement factory worker from Rockland, Maine received his high school diploma at the age of 83, which gives a whole new meaning to “high school senior.” Seavey’s school days had been on hold since 1917, when he and a buddy hopped a freight train and headed down the Maine coast for a wicked-good adventure. His buddy ended up back in Rockland, but Seavey ended up in the United States Army with a free trip to Europe and the Western Front, all expenses paid.

Although I suspect Nola Ochs of Hays, Kan., wouldn’t be too impressed by an 83-year-old high school graduate. Last spring, Ochs received her bachelor’s degree from Fort Hays State University at the age of 95, with one of her granddaughters, Alexandra Ochs, in the same graduating class. Relatives from around the country were in full force, waving little American flags and wearing “Nola’s #1” T-shirts. Ochs was handed her diploma by Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sibelius, which brought the crowd to its feet for a standing ovation.

But it was way too much fuss for Nola, who told a post-ceremony gaggle of reporters, “I was just another student.” Nola is now thinking about enrolling in a master’s program. I think she should. It could be a big plus later in life.

What about the other end of the age spectrum? For those who like May-December stories in both romance and the classroom, there is Brandenn Bremmer of Venango, Neb., who received a high school diploma in 2001 at the ripe old age of 10. Brandenn’s agenda was not complicated: “I want to graduate with a cap and gown,” he told the Associated Press. On the other hand, Michael Kearney of Mobile, Ala., bama might consider a 10-year-old high school grad a slow learner. In 1994, at the age of 10, Kearney earned a degree in anthropology from the University of South Alabama, with a GPA of 3.6. Little brat. See? You’re never old, or too young, to learn, assuming your brain is regulation sized.

So that’s it then. Everything you always wanted to know about life, Hays, Kan., and sentence structure, although we didn’t have time to get into comma placement when an independent clause is linked together with a coordinating conjunction. Don’t hold your breath.

I gotta go.