By Chris Horn

Jeanne Lane never imagined she would take a college class, much less earn a bachelor’s degree.

For this mother of eight children who never finished high school, the daily chores of cooking, laundry, and housekeeping limited her time for intellectual exercise to watching Jeopardy! and perusing the latest Reader’s Digest. But life for Jeanne Lane began again in 1980 at age 54.

That was the year she completed a GED, then enrolled at USC to begin working on a degree in studio arts. Lane didn’t experience college life like an 18-year-old freshman, but neither did she miss out.

“It was hard for me to go to school at that age,” she said. “I did all the things that other studio arts majors had to do for degree requirements. I read books that I’d never even heard of before and spent three summers in Italy learning the language.

“It made me grow a lot … and it probably was the most rewarding thing I did in my life.”

Early on, she rented a room in her little house on Duncan Street to a music student, who later became a psychiatrist practicing in Columbia. Soon, she had two or three students renting rooms every semester; some from the United States, others from countries such as Argentina, Greece, Korea, Turkey, and Egypt.

She learned something from each one: the man from Egypt who zealously fasted during Ramadan; the political exile from Albania; and the student from Singapore who explained that country’s law against chewing gum.

Lane was like a mother to her younger charges, but she didn’t wait on them hand and foot. “They cooked their own food, and we all got along. We didn’t have central air-conditioning or central heat, but they didn’t mind. They just needed a place to sleep.”

Well, not all of them. Zissis Chroneos from Greece slept in a research lab most of the time. He earned his doctorate at USC and later married a woman from Croatia and had three daughters.

Lane hasn’t kept up with all of her student friends from all those years ago. It’s enough to know where most of them are, and she fondly recalls their stories. She remembers best those seven years of being a college student with students from all over the world.

She lives in Florida now, and many of those students have gone back home. “They’re all somewhere in the world,” she said.

Now 79, Lane sees life’s shadows growing longer. “We’re not here on earth for long; it seems like a long time, but it’s not,” she said.

To memorialize all the effort she put into the degree she completed nearly 20 years ago, Lane bought a brick for a Horseshoe walkway that reads “Jeanne B. Lane 1987 BA, Member NLAPW.” The acronym stands for National League of American Pen Women, of which Lane, a published poet, is a member in good standing.

But Lane didn’t stop with one brick. She purchased another for her daughter, Virginia, a 1981 Carolina graduate, and bricks for each of her sons who, with their wives, graduated from Carolina: Michael and his wife, Emily Chalker, and Robert and his wife, Maureen Brown; for her late husband “who paid the tuition,” and for each of her student friends—from the United States and abroad—who earned degrees from USC.

Seventeen bricks all together on a walkway that traverses the Horseshoe near McCutchen House. It’s a nice tribute to a lot of studying. And a fitting memorial to the laughter, love, and learning that bound them all together for a few years in a little house on Duncan Street.