Reverend Jerry Moon celebrated his college graduation Saturday, surrounded by his family, friends, and members of the community. 

It was an accomplishment that was 69 years in the making, and Moon, age 91, has lived a rich and fulfilling life while continuing to work toward his degree, ministering to church families and raising a family of his own.

There’s a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, although the source is unconfirmed, which goes, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Moon doesn’t believe himself to be stupid, and neither would anyone who speaks with him for just a few minutes, but one might conclude that when it came to formal school environments, he was a fish out of water. 

Although his path brought him to college, there was one hurdle he couldn’t vault when it came to graduating from college.

“Foreign language was the kicker,” his daughter Susie Kraeski said in a phone interview last week. “It was a learning challenge and he was never able to complete that one thing,” which was a required credit for graduation.

Moon was able to graduate because Central Methodist no longer requires a foreign language credit to confer a degree, she said. Kraeski credited Cathy Thogmorton for bringing this to the family’s attention.

“I’m very excited for him,” she added. “This is something he worked really hard for, for a very long time. To see it finally happen is a very awesome thing.”

The journey - and the struggle - began for our graduate at a young age.

Moon would tell you he wasn’t the best high school student. He struggled to excel in the classroom in Springfield, Missouri, where he grew up. “I was not college material,” he said. “On a scale of one to 100, I was the one.” His college aptitude tests in high school reflected that. “And I didn’t care,” he recalled. “I hated school, from the first grade. It wasn’t my thing.”

But when it came to technical and hands-on work, he was in his element. “My mind just would not wrap around certain things, but when something came along that I could do [in school], they let me do it,” he recalled. One of those things was working as a projectionist when the school showed movies to the student body.

In high school, Moon participated in a diversified occupations program that allowed students to work during part of the school day and substitute the experience for credit, and he worked at Miller’s Photo Service in Springfield.

“I went to school until noon, had lunch, and then went to work from 2 to 10 p.m.,” he remembered. He worked in the laboratory, processing rolls of film. “I was a negative person,” he joked.

While a high school junior, Moon helped customers from the Marine Corps, who were setting up a reserve office in town, with some laboratory work one day, to crop and improve their photographs. When he presented the results, they suggested he sign up for the reserves, and he did, for two years. 

This led to a four-year career with the Marines after high school, which took him to Virginia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, and included work in movie projection and as a photographic investigator.

While in the Marines, Moon felt the call to another kind of service and became a Methodist minister. 

“For some reason or another, the Lord got ahold of me,” he said. “I still don’t know why. He gave me everything I need, but he didn’t give me a foreign language.”

When Moon enrolled in college at Central Methodist in 1953 to study sociology, he was not a typical college freshman. 

He drove his own car, boarded at a house in town instead of living on campus, and shortly after arriving, was assigned a circuit of four churches as a minister: Moniteau Chapel, Smith Chapel, Bethel, and Petersburg. 

“I had just gotten my license - in fact, I didn’t even have it in hand yet,” when he received his assignment. And his first day on the job was presiding over a funeral at the Moniteau Chapel. He met the family, which included three young women, two of whom were also college students at Central.

The following Sunday, he arrived at the church for the morning service, and one of those young women was the pianist. And then during his first day at school, he joined the two young women for lunch. 

One of those young women became his wife. “And we had many lunches together after that,” he said. 

Moon’s unconventional college career continued in tandem with his pastoral duties. As he moved around Missouri and around the country, he collected credits at Central Missouri State in Warrensburg, National College in Kansas City, Northwest Missouri State, and Missouri Southern State, eventually transferring the credits back to Central Methodist. 

He also raised two daughters, served on various boards, and wrote and photographed for Methodist publications, earning recognition for his work, and took up wood carving, which he still avidly pursues. He returned to Fayette in 1991 to retire, and has lived here since.

There are students on four-year plans. There are students who take five or six years to reach graduation. And there are students who take their time and turn education into a lifelong occupation. Moon’s story is proof that an unusual path may be the most beautiful, and that faith and perseverance bear fruit in time.