At 86, Joe Sheedy Embodied Lifelong Learning

06/01/2021
By David Perry

Joseph Sheedy was in love with learning.

He never passed up an opportunity to figure out another piece of the world. Sometimes, he took folks with him, ready or not.

Alison Sheedy recalls her grandfather, plucking dead frogs from his pool “and, much to my horror, he would dissect them with the grandkids. He really just saw everything as an opportunity to learn.”

They shared what she calls “a bond surrounding our love of learning.” She became a special education teacher and is in the final stages of her doctorate, inspired – especially when the going is rough – by her grandfather.

That love of learning had Joe Sheedy taking college classes long past retirement age. He was one class shy of finishing a bachelor’s degree in psychology at UMass Lowell when he died last December. He was 86.

The university awarded him his bachelor’s degree in psychology, with a minor in criminal justice, posthumously on Feb. 1. He graduated summa cum laude with a 3.842 grade point average.

In this season of pomp and circumstance, Sheedy’s family remembers a man whose sheer love of learning kept him in the classroom well into retirement. His name was on the list of graduates for Commencement in mid-May.

“Lifelong learner?” laughs his wife, Sue. “Oh, god, yes. He was taking all the courses he could. He had a degree from San Jose State in chemistry, and he got an MBA from Babson. I always say it was the one philosophy course he took that turned him into a Unitarian.”

Good thing. They met at the Unitarian Church in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

“I liked his sense of humor,” says Sue. “He made me feel special.” They wed in 1981, a second marriage for both.

“Joe’s focus was always expanding his knowledge, not earning a specific grade in a course,” says Mary Duell, associate teaching professor of psychology. “Joe taught me what it means to be a lifelong learner. We talk about what that means, but Joe lived it every day of his life.”

They met to discuss coursework but conversations drifted to everything from the applications of artificial intelligence in psychology to how to deal with adolescent substance abuse.

He started taking classes at UMass Lowell in 2005 as a non-degree student. His classes were mostly in-person. He eventually enrolled in the bachelor’s degree program. In 2017, he declared psychology his major.

Sheedy was a native of San Francisco. His father founded Sheedy Drayage Co. in 1925 using a single truck to haul materials around the Bay Area. By May 1937, the company had hauled most of the steel used in the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, allowing young Joe, then 3, to be the first child to walk across the landmark bridge during a week of opening ceremonies.

Joe taught me what it means to be a lifelong learner. -Mary Duell, associate teaching professor of psychology

The success of his father’s company was the “driving force behind his motivation in life,” says granddaughter Alison. “He wanted to live up to that success and wanted so badly to take over the family business.”

He was 20 when his father – who never made it past fifth grade – died, according to Alison.

His mother deemed Joe too young for the job. They sold the business.

“But he was still determined to work for himself and make his mark,” Alison says. “It was while he was working toward that goal that he found his love for learning.”

He earned his degree in chemistry and worked in the field, living in California and Georgia. He took a job at Instrumentation Labs in Bedford, Massachusetts, in the early ‘70s as a medical equipment salesman, settling in Chelmsford. He later had his own business, Marketing Resources. He joined the Learning in Retirement Association. He joined the Lowell Camera Club. He sang in the church choir. When it was time to computerize the church records, Joe oversaw the task.

His zest for knowledge thrived.

“It’s funny,” says Sue. “I was so glad to get out of school. It was hard for me to understand how much he loved being there. He was so riveted.”

Early in his career, he traveled often for work, mostly in the South. But he’d never been to Europe and Sue – who ran the company her father started in 1967, Johnston Travel in Chelmsford – took care of that. They took cruises – Europe, Asia, the Panama Canal, the Caribbean. He relished the trips to Morocco and Egypt. She closed the travel business in 2002, but the couple continued to travel.

He decided to take a college class here and there to keep his feet wet and his curiosity quenched.

He eventually delved into the study of addiction and psychology because someone in the family struggled with a serious addiction issue, and he was a veteran of a struggle of his own. When he died, Sheedy had been sober for 40 years.

“He wanted to try to help and he put so much time and energy into it,” says Sue.

“I was impressed by his story and his dedication to personal growth,” says Richard Siegel, who taught the last class Joe took, Contemporary Trends: Addictions.

“His is a perfect example of how education is a lifelong journey,” Siegel wrote in the online condolences for Joe.

He pushed through everything, says Sue. A statistics class was rough, and his punctuation and grammar weren’t always perfect, she says. She was recruited to proofread. “But the content was always good,” she says.

His age fooled people. The last time they talked, Joe told granddaughter Alison about a class that covered how the brain ages. Other students in the class discussed how people lose brain power as they get older. Joe did as well as any of them.

“He and I had a good laugh about that,” says Alison.

“When he would go to class, he loved being with young students,” says Sue. “I mean, they weren’t all teenagers in his classes, but he loved the challenge and rewards of interacting with people of different ages. He had a wonderful respect for all of his professors.”

He embraced technology, even using his iPhone to measure his sleep patterns.

Last fall, he suffered a heart attack while shopping at Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, New Hampshire. He spent three weeks at St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua, went home for six weeks, then congestion and breathing issues sent him to Lowell General Hospital.

And right up until the end, Joe drank in learning. He asked Sue to bring his MacBook to the hospital so he could write his papers and get in touch with his professor to let him know he would be late with his assignments. On the day final exams were beginning for the semester, he died of complications from the heart attack.

“Just knowing he was literally working on this degree from his death bed is heartwarming and heartbreaking,” says Alison.

When her work gets tough, she remembers the man who went to class “with no incentive other than to learn as much as possible.” It helps her “to see through the lens of someone like him, who went back to school for fun and genuinely enjoyed every bit of it, gives me the motivation that I need to push through.

“My grandfather is proof it’s never too late to pursue your dreams.”