Carnett: College success can come late to a family

I pause to reflect this commencement season on the fact that I was the first member of my family to earn a college degree.

Frankly, my extended family would “little note, nor long remember” my accomplishment, and I’d never trumpet it. Though I was the family’s first “academic,” it was really no big deal. I toiled in obscurity. That’s OK; my gaze was on sheepskins, not high-fives.

I’m compelled, in the interest of full disclosure, to report that I earned my bachelor’s degree with honors (3.51 grade point average) and my master’s degree with highest honors (4.0).

As I was growing up, however, higher education was rarely discussed around our dinner table. My family had no point of reference. The Carnetts and Thomlinsons were not bumpkins, but neither were we highly educated. Our roots were firmly planted in the soil of Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

My dad, however, was a native Californian, having been born at the Presidio of San Francisco in 1922. His mother’s family had, for generations, been Bay Area residents.

I realized in 1962, at age 17, that college was my only viable path to a successful future.

I remember Mom saying: “Jim, you’d better get a degree because you’ll never make a living with your hands!”

She was so right!

When I received my bachelor of arts in 1971 and my master of arts in ‘75, nary a member of our clan attended the ceremonies. That didn’t bother me. None had taken a final exam for me either.

My wife, Hedy, was there. We received our graduate degrees together. Family members said nice things at subsequent gatherings.

My dad, a product of “The Greatest Generation,” had wanted to attend college but couldn’t.

He left home in the summer of 1940, after graduating from high school, and joined the Army. I did the same 24 years later. He was stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He was there on Sunday morning, Dec. 7, and fighter aircraft strafed his barracks.

Dad applied for pre-flight training at Santa Ana Army Air Base in 1942 and successfully completed the cadet training program. He washed out of flight school in Texas, however, because of an acute inner-ear problem. He returned to the Santa Ana base as a tech sergeant and ran a mess hall.

My mother, Betty Jean Thomlinson, a civilian, worked for a cadet mess officer, Maj. Philip Caldwell. My parents met in 1943, married in 1944 and had me during the closing months of the war in 1945.

Dad was discharged in November of ’45 and needed a civilian job. We lived in a rented apartment behind my grandparents’ home on Balboa Island. Dad’s first job was at Hershey’s Market, at Marine and Park.

“Your dad was a good student and did well in his cadet training classes,” my 91-year-old mother recalls. “He wanted to go to college but circumstances prevented that.”

Reading between the lines, I suspect my presence had something to do with it.

In spring 1946, Orange County had only two colleges: Fullerton Junior College and Santa Ana College. UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Chapman University and Vanguard University were all yet to arrive on the Orange County scene. Orange Coast College came along in 1948.

Mom and Dad had a second son in 1947, a daughter in 1951 and a new home in Costa Mesa in 1952. Dad worked for Arden Farms as a milkman in Laguna Beach. His hours were long, but our family wanted for nothing and survived for more than a decade and a half on a single income.

Dad, who was a voracious reader and lover of the arts, worked for Arden and later Excelsior Dairy for more than 30 years.

Though Dad never pushed me, I grew up believing that it was my responsibility to do what he’d not been able to do — earn a college degree.

When I finally did, he beamed.

Members of my family have since earned undergraduate, graduate and even doctoral degrees.

And we all owe our deepest gratitude to Pops.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.