Graduating 37 years late

------I noticed that these news stories were no longer on the web and were now archvied, so I wanted to make sure to post the stories on my blog------

To explain to you why in 2006 I went with my father to West Lafayette, Indiana, I have to go back almost 37 years.

While on shore leave at Pearl Harbor, he was in the back seat of a friend's jeep, and when an oncoming car lost control and crashed into the jeep head-on, my Uncle Eugene was killed instantly.

All this happened a week before my father's college graduation in 1969. He left the university immediately to get back to New York for the funeral. He assumed that he would graduate with the spring class in May, but his father (my grandfather) passed away of cancer just before that graduation ceremony. 

While on shore leave at Pearl Harbor, he was in the back seat of a friend's jeep, and when an oncoming car lost control and crashed into the jeep head-on, my Uncle Eugene was killed instantly.

All this happened a week before my father's college graduation in 1969. He left the university immediately to get back to New York for the funeral. He assumed that he would graduate with the spring class in May, but his father (my grandfather) passed away of cancer just before that graduation ceremony. 

Man finds it's never too late to graduate

60-year-old alumnus will walk in Purdue ceremony

By Staci Hupp

staci.hupp@indystar.com

May 13, 2006

Elliot Wilk has checked off much on life's to-do list: Marriage. Children. Retirement.

The one that got away 37 years ago was college graduation.

At 60, Wilk's career as an engineer is over, his days now filled with golf and bridge games. Yet the Florida man is back at Purdue University, his alma mater, today to reclaim a lost rite of passage.

Wilk will stand, in cap and gown, with hundreds of men and women young enough to be his children. His own son will sit in the sea of weepy parents and digital cameras.

Wilk grew up as a triplet in New York City, headed to Indiana for college but left the West Lafayette campus during final exams in January 1969. His brother Eugene, a Navy sailor, had been killed in a head-on Jeep crash.

"I look back now and I say that I was a boy up until that point in my life," Elliot said. "It was like knocking the pins out from under you. "

Purdue officials mailed his degree, which he later framed along with a slide rule he used in calculus class.

Wilk assumed he'd go back to West Lafayette that May and graduate with the class of 1969. And then his father died of cancer.

By then, Purdue was a memory, as faded as the photographs of Wilk's fraternity brothers.

Hints of Purdue trickled down to Wilk's children over time: The beer can with a Boilermaker logo on their father's desk.

"He's an engineer, and they're not emotional people," Lonny said. "But he got a little emotional. I had no idea that he had never gone through graduation."

That moment stayed with Lonny. Last fall, he called Purdue University and arranged a spot for his father.

"I just buckled up my knees when he told me," Elliot Wilk said.

Purdue alumni often show up for graduation a semester late, but "we've never had this type of request before," said Christine Leasure, an assistant registrar. "We're excited to have him."

Wilk's name will appear on the program today. He will be handed a diploma cover as he walks across the stage.

And he will stand with a generation of electrical engineers who learned with laptop computers rather than slide rules. As Wilk sees it, they might as well be the same age.

"It's no different from the Marines charging a hill," he said. " 'Hey, we all got here.' " Graduation will allow Elliot Wilk to bring his life full circle.

In his pocket he plans to carry the yellowed telegram that brought the news of his brother's death 37 years ago.

"That was the point in time that the road diverged so strongly," Wilk said. "That was the start of it. And now I seek the closure."