At 84, Colorado man gets high school diploma

GREELEY, Colorado (AP) — There’s at least one guy with a new high school diploma who’s not worrying about getting into college or finding a job.

After all, Takeshi Murata is 84.

Murata was 18 and a student at University High School in Greeley, Colorado, in 1944 when he was drafted to fight in World War II, according to the Greeley Daily Tribune newspaper.

Murata approached his old school, thinking his military intelligence classes should suffice for any coursework he missed when he left school at 18.

Murata dropped the diploma quest and followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a farmer. He raised five children — each of whom earned college degrees.

But Murata still had no diploma of his own until a teacher at the school, Jeanne Lipman, heard his story last year. She found Murata’s report cards, got an original diploma from one of his old classmates and turned them over to University of Northern Colorado President Kay Norton. The high school is now called University High; the university ran it when Murata attended.

“I’m 84 years old now,” he said. “What am I going to do with a diploma? Look for a job?”

America’s 11 Most Literate Cities

This year’s list of most literate cities has been unveiled, with Minneapolis and Seattle tied for first place and the nation’s northern latitudes coming in with a high bookish quotient. In its sixth year, the annual ranking is put out by John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University. Miller views the level of literacy in a given location as a measure of the place’s quality of life and level of culture. “I wanted to do a study of not whether people could read but whether or not they do read,” he explains. The latter is the more important, he says. After all, in the words of the American literary giant Mark Twain, “The person that doesn’t read has no advantage over the person who can’t.”

The ranking may also indicate some brainy locations where residents have a leg up on overall health. Education is consistently a strong indicator of longevity, and reading, certainly, is a major component of that process.

Inspired by other rankings projects, Miller compiled his by considering American cities with populations greater than 250,000 and drawing on geographic statistics, including online book purchases, number of bookstores per capita, newspaper circulation, trends in reading the newspaper online, library staff per capita, and level of education attained. The result, he says, tends to be relatively consistent, with Minneapolis and Seattle often trading the top spot from year to year or, as they did this year, tying for first.

1) Minneapolis (tie)

1) Seattle (tie)

3) Washington, D.C.

4) St. Paul, Minn.

5) San Francisco

6) Atlanta

7) Denver

8) Boston

9) St. Louis

10) Cincinnati (tie)

10) Portland, Ore. (tie)