This 99-Year-Old Gives the Saying 'Better Late Than Never' a Whole New Meaning
Audrey Crabtree, a 99-year-old Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native, just got her high school diploma.
She'd dropped out more than 80 years ago when, as a senior, just shy of one credit to graduate, she had to interrupt her education due to a swimming and diving accident "that forced her to miss several school days."
And though Crabtree went on to marry and eventually started a successful flower business and a happy family, she always regretted not having obtained her high school diploma.
"She had voiced quite a while back the one regret she had in life was that she never had gotten her diploma," Shelley Hoffman, Crabtree's granddaughter, told the Associated Press.
And so 80 years, three husbands, five children and four grandchildren later, Crabtree's family contacted Waterloo Community Schools and arranged an honorary diploma ceremony for her time at Waterloo East High School back in the 1930s.
"[Now] I feel so much smarter," says the adorable 99-year-old who received a copy of her last report card and memorabilia from her time at the high school (as well as a jacket, homecoming pins and more than 100 handmade congratulatory cards from middle school students).
But don't let Crabtree's delayed degree be an excuse for your own academic procrastination.
"I was a senior [in 1932], but I was short a credit, so I would've had to go back the next fall," she told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, before finishing with her invaluable piece of advice; "I wouldn't advise anyone to drop out."
