A RECORD-BREAKING GRADUATION.

Byline: ROBIN MARTIN, PHOTO BY JANE PHILLIPS

Author, Santa Fe resident obtained bachelor's degree

in journalism at age 90

Mozelle Richardson graduated from college in 2004 and moved to Santa Fe.

That's not unusual, except that she was 90 years and 103 days old at the time of her graduation from the University of Oklahoma. Her grandchildren had her entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for being the oldest person to graduate from college.

Her bachelor's degree in journalism from OU came more than 40 years after she started to write professionally. Most of her six published works are romance stories. Some became best-sellers and were translated into French, German and Scandinavian languages. She remembers how excited she was to hold the first printed copy of her first published book: "It was like giving birth."

Today, Richardson no longer writes. She spends her leisure time knitting for her great-grandchildren; she says she can turn out one sweater a week. Her grandmother taught her to knit during World War I while making socks for soldiers.

She lives in Santa Fe with her daughter, Judy Richardson, executive director of the Heart Gallery, a nonprofit organization that promotes the adoption of foster children.

Richardson describes herself as a "matriarch." She has 15 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren, with two more on the way. Having a large family has taken some getting used to. On Christmas Eve, she and her daughter had a seated dinner for 20 family members at their Santa Fe home. "Christmas almost killed me," she said.

She was born in the Texas Panhandle town of Hereford and grew up as an only child. In high school she knew she would be a writer. She attended junior college in Marshall, in East Texas, and remembers that "it was the first time I saw a tree growing naturally." When she graduated from junior college in 1933, Richardson was "just sick of school. I hated what you had to learn in the first two years of college. My teacher was hung up on (the poet Robert) Browning, and I've hated Browning ever since."

She stayed in Texas for several years, working for a sheriff's office, a district attorney, the Plainview Little Theater and Texas Utilities. In 1939 she married W.T. "Dub" Richardson and moved to Clinton, Okla., where her husband worked for General Motors. Dub went on to own a Ford dealership in Oklahoma City, one of the largest in the country. The couple raised four children in Oklahoma City. Her husband died in 1990.

As her children grew up, Richardson began to write professionally. She said an editor from a large publishing company had told her that to be a writer a person has to write compulsively. She was compulsive, and she remembers that when her son was 15, she had him drive the family car while she sat in the back seat writing.

Her first book, Dear Daddy, Never Let Mother Travel Alone, stemmed from a summer she spent in Paris with her daughter Judy in the early 1960s. This nonfiction work told of her adventures trying to live in the French capital on $5 per day.

An acquaintance in the publishing business told her that to sell books she would have "to polish" her work. So she went back to school.

She began taking college writing courses in 1967. One of her professors at the University of Oklahoma was Foster Harris, who also taught Southwest mystery writer Tony Hillerman. Richardson took classes with Foster for three years "until he kicked me out." He told her she was "using him for a crutch."

She won the university's literary award in 1973. Those were her most prolific years for writing. Her fiction books were published in hardback by William Morrow Co. and in paperback by several publishers, including Ballantine. Several books, including The Song of India, grew out of trips she had taken with her family.

Richardson formally enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in January 2002, on her 88th birthday, and rented an apartment in Norman. OU accepted the credits she had earned at junior college in the 1930s and at other colleges along the way.

"A friend of mine in admissions said, 'You know, Mozelle, you've got scads of credits. If you could just take a science course, you could graduate,' " she said. She had failed botany in 1933 but took a geology course at OU and "just loved it." Although the geology reading assignments were easy for her, she struggled with the lab. The students, who were the age of her grandchildren, were eager to help her.

Richardson graduated in 2004. She opted to skip the mass graduation in the university's football stadium and chose to attend the ceremony at the Gaylord College of Journalism, where she received a standing ovation.

She said she has no desire to write today. Although she keeps thinking of good plots, she doesn't put them down on paper. Her days are filled with family. Besides her daughter in Santa Fe, she has a son, Rock, in Eldorado and a daughter, Susie, in Abiquiu.

Her advice to aspiring authors is to "have another job before you write that best-seller."

CAPTION(S):

1. Mozelle Richardson graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2004, going down in the record books as the oldest person to graduate from college.