Family affair: Daughters help dad get his college degree

June 13--GREENSBORO -- Fred Pegues attended three college commencements in three days in May.

On May 13, Pegues saw daughter Hope graduate from N.C. A&T in the morning. That afternoon, he watched daughter Faith -- they're twins -- get her degree from UNC-Charlotte.

The other graduation ceremony had taken place two days before. At that commencement, it was Fred Pegues' turn to collect a college degree.

At age 59 -- 40 years after graduating from high school -- Pegues got his associate's degree in accounting from Guilford Technical Community College.

"He was really committed," Hope Pegues said. "He could have said, you know, what I've achieved up until now is good enough. But he persevered."

A High Point native who now lives in Greensboro, Fred Pegues graduated from Andrews High School in 1977. After three years as a medical specialist in the U.S. Army, he came home and went back to work at a Holly Farms restaurant, where he had worked in high school.

After managing several local restaurants, Pegues in 1995 went to work for a Whitsett company that makes pill capsules. He moved up into the management ranks before he was laid off in 2007.

Several years earlier, Pegues had gotten seasonal work at TWC Financial, a small tax preparation firm in Greensboro. After the layoff, he went to work full time and has been there ever since. He's now the company's general manager.

As he worked to support his family -- Pegues and his wife Tina have five children born five years apart -- his mother kept pushing him to go to college. "She's been telling me forever that I made the wrong decision" to pick the Army over college, Pegues said.

And as his youngest daughters were moving through Grimsley High School toward college, Pegues thought he should give college a try, too.

"I didn't want to be the one that said, 'Do as I say, not as I do,'" Pegues said. "I felt that if I was driving them to get theirs, I should go get mine."

In 2011, Pegues enrolled at GTCC. But he left after a year because he couldn't balance classes with work. In addition to working at the tax prep firm, Pegues was a notary and his classes often conflicted with that job.

But as time went by, friends and family encouraged him to finish what he had started. At the tax firm, his boss wanted him to expand the business.

"To do that, I felt like I needed a degree just to show people I knew what I was doing," Pegues said. "If you're going to command the money, you've got to have the education behind it."

So Pegues went back to GTCC in 2015. This time, it clicked.

During the fall semesters, the slow time at the tax firm, he took classes during the day.

But the spring semesters were tougher because they overlapped with tax season. Most days, Pegues worked until 5 p.m., then drove to Jamestown for classes that lasted until 9 p.m. Some nights he went back to the office before going home. His homework often kept him up until 2 a.m.

"I'm a workaholic," Pegues said. "Going to work and then going to school never bothered me."

Pegues was rusty at school after being away for nearly four decades. Many assignments required graphing calculators, something he hadn't used at Andrews. Labs and other coursework were done online, another new development since his high school days.

But he did know plenty of tutors. When he needed help with math, he called on Hope, who was studying physics at A&T. For writing assignments, he got up with his eldest daughter, Christina, who had studied mass communications at Winston-Salem State. For everything else, he asked Faith, who was majoring in elementary education at UNC-Charlotte.

"He catches on pretty fast," Faith Pegues said.

Fred Pegues praised his GTCC instructors for being patient with him as he balanced school, work and home. He said his wife gave him plenty of space to get his schoolwork done, even if that meant staying up well past their bedtime. Pegues credited himself for finishing his assignments days, not hours, before they were due.

"I had to stay ahead," he said. "I knew I had work and family stuff to take care of."

Also a huge help was the tutoring he got from his two youngest daughters, who would get their degrees two days after he did.

"I never would have made it without the fam," Pegues said.

Commencement week was a blur. To GTCC's graduation at the Greensboro Coliseum, Pegues brought a 12-person cheering section.

"They're pretty loud," he said. "I heard them. I knew exactly where they were sitting."

Two days later, the Pegues family returned to the Coliseum for A&T's commencement. Fred Pegues said he got to the UNC-Charlotte ceremony that afternoon with about 10 minutes to spare.

With their degrees in hand, the Pegues family has big plans. This fall, Faith will teach second grade at a Durham charter school. Hope will enroll in a five-year graduate program at Duke University, where she will earn a master's and doctorate in medical physics.

Fred, meanwhile, will stay at the tax firm and think about whether he will, as he put it, "complete the four." He's thinking about taking online courses but hasn't yet made up his mind.

Pegues said he learned his lesson from his time at GTCC. If he goes back to college, he said, "it'll have to be at a slower pace."

Contact John Newsom at 336-373-7312 and follow @JohnNewsomNR on Twitter.

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