Closing a chapter

Walker.
Photo by Tom Cogill.

At 67, Mallory Walker had it all. Grown kids, a successful business and a retirement of travel, canoeing and biking on the horizon.

He was missing one thing: his University of Virginia degree.

In 1962, the year Walker was supposed to graduate with a degree in history, he flunked Spanish III, a class needed back then for the University’s romance language requirement. While his friends and fraternity brothers walked down the Lawn, Walker headed home to Washington, D.C.

He wasn’t bitter, he said. But the whole thing was behind him. He’d never go back to finish his degree, he told his family.

Four decades later, he found himself eating his words.

In the fall of 2006, Walker called the University, signed up for two courses and temporarily moved into the guesthouse on a friend’s Albemarle County farm.

In May, Walker graduated, becoming the oldest member of the Class of 2007 and taking back, he said, the years he “wasted” as an undergraduate the first time around.

“This has been the most wonderful, life-giving experience,” he said.

It wasn’t an easy decision.

For decades, Walker worked in real estate finance and, recently, he started to ease into retirement. He had time on his hands and thought he’d like to learn more about western religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Maybe he’d take a class at Georgetown, he told his family.

His son balked.

“He said, ‘Why would you do that? That’s just crazy; go back and get your degree,’” Walker recalled. “I said, ‘Go all the way to Charlottesville? Why would I do that?’”

Why not?

He packed his stuff and headed south. As it turned out, he wouldn’t have to take Spanish all over again. So he enrolled in Comparative Religion 101 and Richard Guy Wilson’s 19th Century American Architecture class. In the religion lecture hall, the average age was 19.1 — that included his 67 years, he joked.

That semester, he ate dining hall food, sipped coffee at Greenberry’s and studied for tests at Clemons Library. He sat in discussion sections, wrote papers and sighed as his classmates insisted on calling him “Mr. Walker.”

“They were all suspicious. They couldn’t understand why anyone like me would come back to school,” he said.

He never preached to them about savoring the University experience or making sure to do things right the first time around. But he probably taught by example. He dived into academia.

Because he was interested in learning, especially the subject she had come back to study, he was a much different student this time than he was in the late 1950s.

“I just loved being able to experience contemporary college life and what it is like to be in an academic environment when you really want to study,” he said. “I basically made up for those wasted years from ’58 to ’62.”

Back then, while the University’s name was well known, it was not as academically prestigious as it is today. Most people passed it off as a party school, he said.

Last fall, when Walker came back to Grounds, the differences between campus life in the ’50s and campus life today were incredibly apparent, from the student body’s diversity to the dining hall salad bars, to the intellectual curiosity of the student body.

In the late ’50s, the only women in his classes were the daughters of faculty members. And forget about anyone of color. The University wasn’t just white, it was “lily white,” he said, from a rather narrow social and economic standpoint.

“One of the early first impressions of coming back was a kind of pride — it sounds stupid when I say it — the pride at seeing this elitist male institution become much more like the face of America,” he said.

Walker did “embarrassingly well” in both classes — A’s. Although his family wanted to see dear old Dad walk down the Lawn in a cap and gown this May, he chose not to.

He didn’t want a fuss.

He just wanted to finish.