Seventy-six years after he walked onto West Virginia University’s campus as a freshman, 94-year-old Anthony Brutto walked off it on Sunday with a diploma.
“It feels great. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Brutto told the Guardian in an interview with his daughter, Lisa Bridges. “Education, it’s the one thing they can’t take away from you. I’ve waited a long time for this.”
Brutto first enrolled for classes at WVU in 1939, when tuition at the school cost $50. Crafting with wood since he was 14, Brutto pursued his love of the mechanical arts in school, studying engineering and industrial arts. He had nearly made it to graduation when the US army air corps drafted him into service for the second world war.
He served for three and a half years as an airplane mechanic, and was also an instructor for Chinese allies who needed to learn how to service planes.
“I had to repair parts that were heavily damaged, and make sure the plane is safe again so the pilot can fly,” he said, remembering how engineers had to synchronize the machine guns and propellors of P-39s to make sure the bullets passed through the blades.
Discharged in 1946, Brutto briefly went back to school but had to drop out to care for his wife, who fell sick around that time. He then took up work as a machinist in cities around the country. Over the years he raised a family – he now has five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren – and continued his piecemeal education, both in school and at work. He taught himself trigonometry while working in Cleveland and learned the fastidious work of a machinist, but was always a few hours away from finishing his degree.
He also continued his hobby of woodworking, crafting delicate chains and detailed birds, elephants and other animals and objects, some of which take as long as eight to 10 hours to be finished in their smooth, polished form.
A web developer for the university, Bridges noticed that her father might be eligible to finish his degree and filled out the paperwork for him last year. Looking over his 18 months at school, his 38 months’ training as a machinist, and his decades of work, the university found he had earned his bachelor’s degree, more than three-quarters of a century after he first enrolled.Brutto retired in the 1980s and devoted himself to the crafting, which his daughter said is still his passion and has “kept him creative and meticulous throughout his life”. The man himself said that his assiduous attention to detail came from the toolroom, where “we used to work with metal two- to three-thousandths of an inch thick, like cellophane. Today you don’t need people who do that because you have all these robots.”
Now Brutto says the community has embraced his story: he’s received graduation cards from impressed students, calls from family and old friends, and strangers stop him in the street and grocery store.
“People recognize me now,” Brutto said. “I had a woman call me from Florida yesterday, my wife’s cousin, and she congratulated me. I have a friend in Texas who saw it on Facebook, and she called and congratulated me. Everybody’s nice as far as I’m concerned.”
For now, Brutto says he plans on doing more woodworking once the interviews and calls from around the country finally slow down. He and his daughter said they’d also like time simply to appreciate the achievement. “My daughter created this possibility to get an education and I’m trying to do my best,” he said. “I’m proud that she did this for me, and pleased with myself too.”
As for his plans after graduation, Brutto said he’d consider a master’s degree in time: “I’d like to study math, even if everything’s done by computers now. I was good at art when I was young too. There’s a lot I’d like to do. There’s plenty of time.”
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