Never say Never! ;)
Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2003 1:23 pm
RICHMOND, California (AP) -- At 97, Gustava Bennett Burrus is the oldest person ever to graduate from Richmond High School.
The great-great-grandmother walked across the stage at Richmond Auditorium Saturday to accept an honorary diploma at the San Francisco Bay area public school, which was founded two years after her birth.
"My dream has come true," Burrus said.
Burrus, whose education was cut short in the fourth grade, began attending computer classes at the high school in January. It was her third time taking courses there over the past decade.
Her interest in computing began with the emergence of personal computers in the 1980s, but it wasn't until this year that she learned how to use a keyboard and mouse.
"This world is going to be a computer world," she said. "Everything is going to be run by computers."
Burrus was born in 1905 in a small Louisiana town, one of 10 children in a family of sharecroppers.
Two years later, her family moved to rural Oklahoma where they grew cotton, corn, tomatoes and other crops.
She attended school in a one-room school house in Boley, Oklahoma, until her parents pulled her out to help support the family.
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