Manual High School has a saying that students are “once a Thunderbolt, always a Thunderbolt.”
The school delivered on that promise Wednesday as two Denver siblings — one who left to serve his country, the other who went to work to support her family — became honorary members of the Class of 2019, more than 75 years after dropping out.
George Ramirez, 95, and his sister Anita Ramirez Cruz, 94, received their diplomas in front of family members and a few Denver Public Schools employees in a Manual High classroom Wednesday.
While the assembly was smaller than most Denver Public Schools graduations, it did have all the trappings, including “Pomp and Circumstance” as the two walked in on family members’ arms, a graduation speaker — school board member Jennifer Bacon, who said the two embodied the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that education is about intelligence and character — and graduation caps, which someone coaxed Ramirez to throw for a photo at the end.
Ramirez dropped out at age 17 to serve in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program that fought fires, built campgrounds and did other outdoor work in Colorado and across the country. Not long afterward, the United States entered World War II; he enlisted and served as a tank gunner in France.
Unlike today, kids in the 1940s didn’t get frequent messages about the importance of finishing high school and attending college, Ramirez said. Though he didn’t have a diploma, he was able to start a roofing company and support a large family, who all completed at least high school.
“Now, from grade school they tell you how far you’re going to go,” he said. “They didn’t do the pounding in your head that they do today.”
Schools also didn’t have the same supports they do now, said Cruz, who has dyslexia, a learning disability that makes it harder to learn to read or spell. In those days, no one at Manual knew what dyslexia was, let alone how to help a student work through the fear that can come with it, she said.
She worked as a nanny for three years after leaving school to help support her family, got married and did factory work while raising three children.
“It was a beautiful school, but I got scared,” Cruz said.
Eileen Villanueba, one of Ramirez’s seven surviving children, said her brother David Ramirez set the process in motion when their father recently started talking about never getting his diploma. Ramirez always emphasized the importance of school — four of his children work in education — but he never talked much about his early life or anything that he felt he had missed, she said.
Villanueba and her sister, Karen Lopez, joked that their dad might never forgive them for creating so much “hoopla” around his graduation ceremony, but said they knew he was excited to join the family’s long list of graduates. Ramirez has 23 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren, many of whom attended college, and Cruz’s five grandchildren earned five bachelor’s degrees, four master’s degrees and a doctorate.
“He didn’t sleep last night,” Villanueba said. “There’s a lot of excitement.”
Manual principal Joe Glover said it’s rare to award an honorary high school diploma, and, as far as he knows, DPS had never awarded one so long after a student left school. He said the siblings’ commitment to their children’s education and Ramirez’s service were things the school wanted to recognize.
“It was our honor to do it,” he said.
Ramirez and Cruz said they hadn’t thought much about graduation while working and raising their families, but were glad the ceremony made their children and grandchildren happy. Cruz said she didn’t mind factory work, but she pushed her children to do well in school so they had access to all the “possibilities” that come with education.
“Now I have two great-grandchildren, and we’ll make them go to school,” she said. “It’s the biggest thing we do.”
