{Cincinnati, Ohio}...Eighty-nine year old Clell Elliott, a Sandy Hook, Kentucky native who started his education in a one-room schoolhouse in eastern Kentucky, will graduate Saturday from a university in southern Ohio where he began as a freshman more than 50 years ago. Elliott, who now lives in the Ohio River town of Franklin Furnace, says an adult studies program at the University of Rio Grande, about 120 miles east of Cincinnati, has allowed him to combine previous college credits with seven decades of work experience and realize his lifelong ambition with a bachelor of science degree in business management. His sharecropper father insisted he drop out as a high school sophomore in 1938 to work the 201-acre farm in Carter County where the family grew tobacco, corn and other crops. Elliott says marrying at a young age, serving in the Navy in World War II and raising three children with his late wife, Maggie, kept him from thinking about his college goal for years.
