Meet Appleton's Rosemary Lloyd, 88, who just graduated from Marian University
APPLETON - Rosemary Lloyd fills her home with beautiful pieces of china, every book she’s ever read and countless other mementos of her 88 years. But among the clocks, paintings and colorful knickknacks, there’s one thing you won’t find.
Her first college report card.
That’s because Lloyd knew her mother wouldn't be happy to see the grades she’d received in her science classes. So that piece of paper was quickly torn up and flushed down the toilet.
“It was not up to standards and I was so afraid of the reaction at home,” she said.
It was the early 1950s and Lloyd was studying to be a medical technologist at Marian College – today’s Marian University - in Fond du Lac. She was out of her element sitting through those science classes, and unfortunately, her grades reflected that. But they were no indication of the lifelong tango Lloyd would go on to have with education.
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This semester, Lloyd made her mark as the oldest student ever to graduate at Marian - the university that has equally made its mark on her. To better accommodate her, the university held a separate ceremony for her last week closer to her Appleton home.
“This is the best example of lifelong learning,” university president Michelle Majewski said.
Two things were ubiquitous at Lloyd’s graduation party: laughter and cake. There was carrot cake, a lemon poppy-seed sheet cake and three types of cupcakes – some topped with lime green and hot pink frosting. Lloyd even had a piece of cake for breakfast the next morning.
But perhaps sweeter than the desserts was Lloyd’s giddiness and quick-witted tongue.
When people kept lining up for photos with her in her cap and gown, she told one of them, “Until 3 p.m., there’s no charge.”
And when she was showing off her diploma, she told everyone, “This is amazing and it has my name on it.”
‘There’s a really large policeman here and he wants to talk to you’
After earning poor marks in those early science classes at Marian, the dean of women at the time, Sister Muriel, sat Lloyd down and said, “We’re going to take you out of those science classes.”
Instead, she enrolled Lloyd in a children’s literature class with Sister Francis Assisi. It was a complete edit to her original plan, but Lloyd said that class was “mind-opening.” Rather than trying to get into the medical field, Lloyd set her eyes on teaching in a rural school after two years of school, with the intention of continuing to take classes at night to complete her degree.
And that’s what she did. She became the only teacher at Randolph School, a one-room schoolhouse without indoor plumbing in Lamartine – about 10 miles southeast of Rosendale. It was simple, but Lloyd - then Rosemary Born -poured her heart into that schoolhouse over the two years she taught there. Her mother even made her red-and-white checkered curtains to soften the space.
But her time at Randolph came to an unexpected end.
Unbeknownst to Lloyd, a police officer from Fond du Lac County went to Marian, looking for a second- and third-grade teacher. The nuns sent him to Lloyd’s schoolhouse.
From there, Lloyd said, it went something like this:
“There was a very loud knock on the door and a little boy named Peter Michaels came back and said, ‘Miss Born, there’s a really large policeman and he wants to talk to you.”
The police officer told Lloyd about an opening to teach second and third grade at Brandon Elementary School, a rather new school at the time, Lloyd said. There would be other teachers there for her to work with, unlike her current situation being the sole teacher at Randolph, and the indoor plumbing would be a nice perk. She took the job.
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Among the 25 or so people who came to Lloyd’s commencement were two of her former students.
Pat Badtke and David Lemmenes had Lloyd as their second-grade teacher in the late 1950s, when they attended Brandon Elementary. The three snapped a photo together, with Lloyd wearing her cap and gown and holding her newly received diploma.
“It’s not every day you get to see your second-grade teacher get her college degree,” Lemmenes said with a smile.
Lloyd’s goal for her classroom was to make her students feel welcome. Although she grew up in Fond du Lac, she moved to Arizona for a few years when her father was ill with tuberculosis before coming back to Wisconsin. So, she knew how it felt to step into a new community.
To this day, she remembers the name – first and last – of every child she ever taught.
Bill Lloyd would be so happy
After two years teaching at Brandon, Lloyd spent four years teaching at Banta Elementary in Menasha. Along the way, she ended up marrying a man named Bill Lloyd. They’d known each other growing up, but their love story didn’t start until their adult lives.
He worked for Kimberly-Clark and eventually his work took them around the world. Banta was her last full-time teaching job before the two of them bounced to Canada and England and South Carolina before landing back in Wisconsin.
Bill decided to get his master's of business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in the '70s and encouraged Rosemary to take some classes there, too. She did, but still didn’t finish her degree.
It was until two years ago when Rosemary’s caretaker was taking her to the dentist – which is near Marian’s former satellite campus in Appleton – that the two decided to reach out to Marian to see how many credits Rosemary would need to finish her degree.
She only needed two credits. Between those initial two years at Marian, the courses she took during her early years as a teacher and her time at Oshkosh, Rosemary had spent decades being just two credits away from a bachelor’s degree.
Rosemary completed a capstone class for her final credits. The professor traveled to Appleton to meet with her and complete the course.
Now, thanks to her relentless pursuit of education over the span of almost seven decades, Rosemary has a bachelor of science in interdisciplinary studies.
When asked how Bill would feel about her getting her diploma, she said, holding back a few tears, “He was nonchalant about things. He wouldn’t have a lot to say, but I know he’d be very happy. He really would, yeah.”
After all these years and credits she’s earned, Lloyd’s favorite class is still children’s literature.
Reach AnnMarie Hilton at ahilton@gannett.com or 920-370-8045. Follow her on Twitter at @hilton_annmarie.
This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: 88-year-old Appleton woman graduates from Marian University
