47 years later, an associate's degree

Sisters resident Col. Bob Woollard, U.S. Army, Ret., recently collected his Associate of Science degree from COCC - 47 years after finishing his last class there. All he needed was to transfer one credit, for a PE class, and the parchment was his.

It's not as though Woollard needed any more letters after his name. In those 47 years, he served his country with distinction in the Army National Guard and in the Department of the Army, earning a bachelors degree in botany and two master's degrees, in business administration and education.

"The only reason for wanting to graduate from COCC, walk across the stage and get a diploma, was to recognize the positive impact that COCC had on my life," he said.

He credits the encouragement, strong standards and mentorship he experienced there with turning his life toward success and achievement.

"I nearly flunked out of high school," he said.

Growing up in Bend, Woollard graduated from Bend High School in 1963. One of his high school counselors tried to dissuade him from continuing to college, saying he wasn't college material. His employer at the Owl Pharmacy in Bend countered that negative advice. For two years he told the young man that hard work equals achievement and he could do anything he set his mind to.

Taking that advice to heart - and to prove the counselor wrong - Woollard went to Eastern Oregon University in 1964, where he got Bs and Cs.

"Pretty good for me," he said.

Returning to Bend a year later he enrolled at COCC and achieved a 4.0 GPA. The college at that time had four buildings, no landscaping and a really good student/teacher ratio. And Woollard was discovering that his pharmacy employer was right.

"COCC was the first time I realized I could be pretty good at something," he said.

He joined the National Guard in 1966, and before he could collect his degree from COCC, life intervened. He went to work for the Forest Service in Corvallis and enrolled at Oregon State University, earning his botany degree in 1971. Woollard also completed the Army National Guard Officer Candidate School. He collected his degree from OSU and a week later earned the rank of 2nd Lieutenant from the National Guard OCS.

A Forest Service job took him to Fairbanks, Alaska. He quit that job after a year, when an active-duty Guard position opened up as a recruiter.

"The Army puts lots of responsibility on officers," he said. "I wanted the challenge."

The challenges kept coming. His postings took him to two more locations in Alaska - one with an Eskimo unit in Kotzebue and then to Juneau as an administrator.

Woollard realized an advanced degree in business would be an advantage, so leaving Juneau he headed to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Eighteen months later, in 1979, he received his MBA and promotion to captain.

A job as an ROTC instructor at Texas A&M, Kingsville, followed.

"It was the best assignment I ever had," he said.

He was promoted to major there.

His next posting, which included promotion to lieutenant colonel, was to Pryor, Oklahoma. He then went to the Pentagon, where he was in charge of all the logistics training sites in the U.S.

"All of a sudden I had to make presentations to two- and three-star generals," he said.

Those men were extremely smart, and recognized and respected the truth, he added. They could be very intimidating, but Woollard had come a long way from the high school screw-up who nearly flunked out.

A battalion command in Flagstaff gave a two-year respite from the East Coast, then Woollard was sent back to Washington, D.C. to the National Guard Bureau Command Logistics Review Team. That assignment entailed visits to all 50 states and four territories conducting evaluations of logistics operations. This meant sometimes having to communicate, carefully, to a two-star general that his unit needed to improve on a few things.

Woollard's final posting was as chief of the Army logistics operations center at the Pentagon, working for the Department of the Army and again conducting briefings for generals. He also worked toward a master's of science and education from Old Dominion University in Arlington, VA. Upon retirement from the Army National Guard in 2001, with the rank of colonel, Woollard went to work for four years as a sixth-grade math teacher in the Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia.

A diagnosis of Parkinson's disease put a stop to Woollard's teaching career, and he and his wife, Pat, returned to Central Oregon in 2008.

"This whole journey comes back to what I learned from my time at COCC and the skills I gained there," said Woollard.