A college diploma marks a promise long kept Posted on May 11th
Dottie McCain will graduate from college tomorrow, four decades - that’s decades - after she started.
Time and again her quest was derailed, by the joys of raising a family, and by illness and death, including a son’s suicide.
Yet she never gave up on the promise that she had made to her father, a farmer and textile worker with dreams for his nine children.
She would finish college.
That the Germantown grandmother will graduate on Mother’s Day, with a degree in sociology from La Salle University, makes the achievement all the sweeter.
“That’s the best present I could receive,” said McCain, 60, who, dressed in a gray pantsuit and wearing a gold watch, looks more the professor than the student.
Growing up on a small farm in South Carolina, she loved to hear her father talk about two distant relatives who achieved greatness when few African Americans went to college: James Nabrit Jr., a prominent civil rights lawyer who became president of Howard University in the 1960s, and his brother, Samuel Milton Nabrit, an academic and marine biologist who served on the Atomic Energy Commission and Brown University’s board of trustees.
“I wanted to be a part of that,” said McCain, the youngest of nine children, whose mother died in childbirth when she was 18 months old. “I felt connected to them even though I never met them. It instilled a feeling that I can do that.”
Her father, who raised the brood, was thrilled when his baby enrolled at Paine College in Augusta, Ga.
But she had married her high school sweetheart and after two years at Paine, they moved to Philadelphia so he could attend graduate school at Temple University.
“I knew my dad was disappointed that I was dropping out,” McCain said.
She vowed to continue and two years later, in 1969, enrolled at Cheyney State College despite a long commute and a full-time job as an income maintenance worker with the Philadelphia Department of Public Welfare.
When she got pregnant a year later, she quit school once again. But the tug of education stayed with her and in 1978, with a full-time job and two young children, she signed up at La Salle.
“I felt like something was missing, and I wanted to do it for my dad,” she said.
This time - even through the loss of a baby, born at five months - McCain stayed in school. But when she got pregnant again, she once more put college aside.
For the next 25 years she contentedly raised five children, helped her husband, Henry, build their financial-services business, Primerica, in Germantown, and worked numerous volunteer jobs at Bright Hope Baptist Church.
But as she watched each of her children go off to college - Temple, Chestnut Hill, Florida A&M - the void in her own life was ever clearer. She would be the only one in her family without a sheepskin. And though her father had died, she wanted to make good on her promise.
So in January 2006, she returned to La Salle, determined to earn the last 30 credits she needed.
The changes she found on campus were shocking.
“Kids were coming out of high school who knew how to do things on the computer with their eyes closed,” she said with a laugh. “The technology part was really challenging for me.”
“Even going on the computer in the library to do research was hard because I was embarrassed to ask the librarian for help,” she said.
Her courage would be tested in greater ways that semester.
In March, her husband suffered a stroke that paralyzed his left arm. She withdrew from her classes to nurse him back to health.
The couple credit his recovery to prayer and faith. But McCain could not regain her zest for learning.
“I said school’s not in the picture for me,” she said. “Every time I went back, I got pregnant. Now my husband got sick. I’m not doing it.”
But with her husband’s encouragement, she returned to the classroom in September. Then, on Dec. 5, 2006, the night before a final exam, her fourth child, Jonathan, 21, committed suicide.
She tried to take the test the next day but could not concentrate. Her professor allowed her to finish later.
“I was thinking, ‘God, are you trying to tell me something?’ The darkest moments in my life are centered around school,” she said, tearing up at the memory.
This time she didn’t quit.
Her adviser, Brother Tri Nguyen, said McCain impressed him as no other student had, coping with her traumas with “courage, resilience and serenity.”
She even auditioned to be the commencement speaker. Her talk evoked her passion for life, family and learning and, though she was not picked, the selection committee posted excerpts on the La Salle Web site.
To kick off the festivities, her family planned a banquet for tonight with 70 well-wishers, including a niece of the two relatives who inspired her so long ago. They met a few years ago when McCain noticed that a guest speaker at her church had the same family name, Nabrit. The woman, a pediatrician, was living in Philadelphia.
Barbara Nabrit Stephens, who has moved to Florida, said she feels fortunate to have met her long-lost cousin.
“Dottie serves as a model to our young people how to persevere and achieve success,” she said. “She shows how you cannot let life’s challenges deter you from your ultimate goals.”
To McCain, her accomplishment is bittersweet.
“I look back and think, would all this have happened if I wasn’t in school?” she said. “But I had made a promise to my dad, and I completed that.”
It comes as no surprise that she is now thinking of graduate school, either for business or ministry. Or maybe she’ll finish the novel she has been tinkering with for years.
Members of her family do not doubt that she will do whatever she puts her mind to. But they never thought she needed a college degree to be a success.
“A degree is important to her, but it’s not the most important thing in her life,” said her son Marcus, 37, who works for a financial-services company. “Her family comes first.”
Her husband concurred. “She is a number-one wife and mother,” he said.
To read Dottie McCain’s submitted commencement speech, go to http://go.philly.com/dmccain
Contact staff writer Kathy Boccella at 610-313-8123 or kboccella@phillynews.com.
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