ROAD TO GRADUATION ROCKY FOR CAPE MAN

Terry Juden figures it's about time he graduates from college.

He first enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University nearly 30 years ago. Today, the Cape Girardeau man will graduate with an industrial management degree.

At age 48, Juden's path to graduation has been a difficult one.

He nearly died from chemical poisoning in Texas. Fire of suspicious origin destroyed his Cape Girardeau manufacturing firm in April 1993.

"Everything I owned went up in smoke that day," he said. All of his tools and equipment were destroyed in the fire in the 2100 block of Independence.

He started the business and then took on investors. The business was about three years old at the time of the fire. The blaze put him out of business.

He found other jobs to pay the bills.

In recent years, he worked nights at the Lee-Rowan plant in Jackson and attended classes during the day. He often put in 50 to 60 hours a week at the plant.

But the long hours wore him out. He quit the factory job a few months ago. He does remodeling and carpentry work now.

Through it all, Juden has remained optimistic.

He wants to be an industrial management consultant and help companies re-engineer their manufacturing equipment.

In that line of work, it is important to have a college degree, he said.

"I like manufacturing. I like machine processing," he said.

There is a need for technologically-minded people in industry, he said.

Juden has a wealth of experience with machinery. He has done his share of hard work.

He grew up on a rural Cape Girardeau farm and has spent his life working with his hands.

Juden has been a student on the Southeast campus since 1959, when he entered fifth grade at the College Training School. The school was housed in what is now Crisp Hall.

He graduated from the old College High in 1967, and promptly enrolled in college classes at Southeast.

He joined the National Guard and then served two years in the Army. He served as a medic at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, during the Vietnam War, working with burn patients.

He returned to Cape Girardeau and resumed taking classes at Southeast in 1970. His goal was to be an industrial arts teacher.

He was active in the Vet Corp, a campus group that later became part of a national association of Vietnam veterans.

By this time, Juden was married and had a family.

Juden worked his way through school from 1970 to 1976. He worked construction jobs in the summer and attended college in the fall.

He came within eight hours of graduating with a teaching degree. But he needed to complete a student-teaching requirement.

He was assigned to student teach in an out-of-town school district, but family responsibilities made it impossible for him to student teach.

He said he couldn't afford to give up his construction jobs for eight weeks. So he dropped out of school.

Over the years, Juden worked as a millwright, setting up machinery at power plans in Colorado and Wyoming.

He spent two construction seasons working on the Alaska pipeline project while his family remained in Cape Girardeau.

At $800, the pay was good. Juden helped construct the pipeline north of Fairbanks. It felt like winter even in the summer.

Juden recalled it snowed one Fourth of July. "We worked seven days a week and 16 hours a day."

Four-wheel drive buses transported construction workers to the job. Juden said the pipeline workers were an independent breed.

"I can't imagine the Wild, Wild West was any wilder than these guys," he said.

In 1981, he and his family moved to Houston, where he worked for a construction company on a job at a chemical plant.

While working on machinery one day, he was exposed to a toxic gas that was a major ingredient in mustard gas.

"This cloud of gas just came over me," he said.

The deadly gas had killed two people at the plant just a month earlier.

Juden was hospitalized in a coma for a time. After coming out of the coma, it took him another year to recover.

Juden changed careers. He began building homes in Houston and Dallas. In 1985, the family moved to Dallas.

But the economy crumbled in the oil crunch of the 1980s. The economics woes spilled over to teen-agers, who committed suicide, he said.

He and his wife, LaDonna, decided that was no environment in which to raise a family. They moved back to their home in Cape Girardeau just before Christmas 1986.

The Southeast campus is a family affair for the Judens. His uncle, Andy Juden Sr., served on the school's Board of Regents. The school's Houck Stadium is named after his great-grandfather, Louis Houck.

LaDonna Juden is a senior at Southeast, majoring in interior design. One of their daughters is a junior, majoring in early childhood education at Southeast. One of their sons plans to return from missionary work in Chile to enroll at Southeast.

The Judens have six children, ranging in age from 9 to 27.

"In general, the whole family is anxious for me to graduate," said Terry Juden. "A lot of them have watched me struggle for years."