College Years
After his service with the Navy, Armstrong returned to Purdue, where his best grades came in the four semesters following his return from Korea. His final GPA was 4.8 out of 6.0. He pledged the Phi Delta Theta fraternity after his return and he wrote and co-directed its musical as part of the all-student revue; he was also a member of Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity and a baritone player in the Purdue All-American Marching Band. Armstrong graduated in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering.
After returning to Purdue, he met Janet Elizabeth Shearon, who was majoring in home economics. According to the couple, there was no real courtship, and neither could remember the exact circumstances of their engagement, except that it occurred while Armstrong was working at the NACA's Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory. They were married on January 28, 1956, at the Congregational Church in Wilmette, Illinois. When he moved to Edwards Air Force Base, he lived in the bachelor quarters of the base, while Janet lived in the Westwood district of Los Angeles. After one semester, they moved into a house in Antelope Valley. Janet never finished her degree, a fact she regretted later in life.
The couple had three children together: Eric, Karen, and Mark. In June 1961, daughter Karen was diagnosed with a malignant tumor of the middle part of her brain stem; X-ray treatment slowed its growth, but her health deteriorated to the point where she could no longer walk or talk. Two-year-old Karen died of pneumonia, related to her weakened health, on January 28, 1962.
Armstrong later completed his master of science degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Southern California.
Read more about this topic: Neil Armstrong
Famous quotes containing the words college and/or years:
“Thirty-five years ago, when I was a college student, people wrote letters. The businessman who read, the lawyer who traveled; the dressmaker in evening school, my unhappy mother, our expectant neighbor: all conducted an often large and varied correspondence. It was the accustomed way of ordinarily educated people to occupy the world beyond their own small and immediate lives.”
—Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)
“When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man’s slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)