Marian Almond, 80, walks in Amherst High graduation

Marian Almond was told no, and she didn’t accept that.

“About two years ago, I went out and I was interested in this job, for being a tutor,” Almond recalled. She already volunteers one day a week at Lynchburg General Hospital, and it seemed like a good fit in her life. Almond had only recently become accustomed to living along after her husband Edward’s 1998 death.

But the answer was big, fat “no” because she didn’t have a high school diploma or GED.

She brooded over it, but didn’t immediately do anything about it.

Until January.

“So, I just had a lot of time on my hands here,” she said. “I called the number for the GED, and I said, ‘I’m 80 years old, you think I can do it?’”

“We have one who’s 84,” replied Edward Hopkins, a longtime Amherst County educator. Almond told herself, “If she can do it, I can do it,” she recalled.

Almond finished her classes, passed her tests and will walk with the Amherst County High School Class of 2009 today at the Vines Center.

“To me, that was the only thing I missed,” she said. “I didn’t get to walk down the aisle to ‘Pomp and Circumstance.’ They tell me there’s a lot of steps over there at the Vines Center, I hope I can make them.”

Almond spelled out her feelings about her accomplishment in the tenor of someone who has lived a long life.

“Well, I don’t feel like I’ve done very much,” she said. “I breezed through it pretty fast.”

Almond was more committed than she let on, said her teacher, Cathy Campbell, an eighth-grade language arts teacher and the GED administrator and lead teacher.

“Determined? Most definitely, I would say with a capital D,” Campbell said. “She was very faithful for three nights a week.”

Math was maddening, though.

“Two and two adds up to four, that’s the best I can do,” she said. “I liked to broke my neck on math. Alegbra. I had it in school, but my Lord, that was 60 years ago. I got a boy who’s real smart at it, he helped me through it.” So did another of her teachers, Teri Grey.

“It still doesn’t make sense to me,” Almond chuckled.

Almond was born and raised in Appomattox. She loved Lynchburg and attended city schools. “I hated schools here,” she recalled. “You had to be from the right neighborhood to get anywhere.”

That was in the early 1940’s, just after World War II began, and when she was a junior, she realized she could get a job if she told potential employers that she was 18. She was actually 16.

“So, I quit school,” she recalled, against her mother’s wishes.

She paid her mother, Mirtle Johnson Evans, $5 a week for room and board, from a salary of $18 a week, working first as a store clerk and then at Craddock Terry, in the jobbing house, shipping shoes. She worked in an office, writing bills of laden and government contracts. “That was a pain in the neck, you had to make six, seven copies of everything you did,” she recalled.

She got married in 1946, and her son, Ricky, was born in 1950. He now runs Almond’s Towing Service and tows primarily for the Amherst County Sheriff’s Office. Her daughter, Dana, died in 2001.

Almond then became a church secretary for two churches and then joined Scott Insurance in 1973, where she obtained a life insurance license and also worked with property and casualty policies. She retired in 1994.

People she meets marvel at her accomplishment, said Almond, who simply is “Meemaw” to her family.

“Everybody I meet congratulates me,” she said.

Almond turns 81 on June 24. And she still plans to become a volunteer tutor in a literacy program in Monroe.

For more information about the GED program in Amherst County, call (434) 528-6494.