My story begins in the summer of 1975 when I was 22 years old. I had graduated from High School in southeastern Virginia four years earlier and since that time had been floundering, trying to figure out life. I wished I had gone to college. For three summers I had seen high school classmates come home for the summer and then go back to school in the fall. If I had gone to college right after graduation, I would almost be done, I reasoned.