The 84-year-old will finish what he started in 1933 when he graduates on Memorial Day with a degree in history
Harold Cohen says it's never too late to start. He married at age 40. At a time when some people become grandparents, he became a father. In 1987, Cohen entered Brown as a 71-year-old student resuming an undergraduate education.
Taking one course per semester, Cohen has fulfilled the requirements for a history concentration. He graduates this Memorial Day at age 84.
Cohen finds that learning is satisfying.
"If you have the desire to learn, particularly if you have the time and can afford it, then age should not be a barrier," he said. "There is so much to know. When you go to school as a child, your parents push you. But as an adult, you have to have the desire to learn.
"Thinking you can't keep up with young people is a state of mind," Cohen continued. "John Glenn didn't think he was too old for the space shuttle. George Bush didn't think he was too old to jump out of a plane. Jacques Cousteau wasn't too old to visit the bottom of the sea. If you feel old, you'll be old."
Cohen's life has taken powerful turns. In 1933, during the heart of the Depression, the senior at Classical High School in Providence had to postpone his entrance to Brown. His father had just passed away, preceded by Cohen's mother, and he had to work to support himself, his brother and three sisters.
When Cohen was 20, he and a friend started a paper recycling company. Shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Cohen was among the first Army troops to leave the United States. After attending radar school in Hawaii, he went on to take part in the invasion of Guam. For four and a half years, Cohen served overseas.
Once home, Cohen rejoined his company. The partners sold the firm in 1984; Cohen stayed on until 1986. At the urging of his wife and daughter, he began to think about going back to school.
So, like other returning undergraduates, Cohen wrote an entrance paper about why he delayed entering college. In 1987, he became a living example for his first class, which was a look at high school in the 1930s. The professor "seemed tickled pink that I was in the course," he said. The experience encouraged him.
"The teachers are not flattered that I'm in their courses, but they seemed pleased to have me there," he said. "When it comes to the school experience I like the most, I think of the instructors. An instructor may make the course, or at least make it palatable."
It's mid-term time and Cohen is in study mode. After more than a dozen years and several dozen courses, his hunger for new knowledge remains strong, both in and out of the classroom. Cohen makes it a point to mention what he learned from his mother-in-law, who died in 1998 at age "99 and three-quarters."
"My mother-in-law never referred to herself as old," he said. "Sometimes she referred to others as old. She was an active woman, a good example of someone who was not sitting and watching the boob tube all day and saying how old she was."