Uncle Carl Peterson, Education

The last set of documentation I have regarding the Peterson family I acquired after the death of my mother. After she died and after the funeral we six children went through her house “on the hill” and chose what we each of us wanted to retain for ourselves. I recall I was looking through the drawers of the dresser that was standing at the west end of the sleeping porch that was on the south side of the second floor. It was the floor where the four or five bedrooms and the bathroom were. I came upon a bundle of old letters and some miscellaneous papers that had been collected by my uncle Carl from a time around the turn of the century.

I speculate that he had forgotten about them when he and my aunt Esther left the house to go to the old folks home at Madrid. Maybe he would have destroyed them had he remembered they were there. The sleeping porch was where he slept all the time he lived in that house, winter or summer. With only a couple of blankets over him but, in later years at least, with a knitted cap covering his bald head. The sleeping porch did not have a clothes closet attached to it, that was in the bedroom separated form it by a door, the bedroom in which my uncle George always slept and in which he spent most of his waking hours also.

I took the bundle of papers, not asking my siblings if they wanted them. Later when I examined them they turned out to be largely letters he had received from members of the family when he was taking a business course in Des Moines. A large fraction were from his mother and they were in Swedish so I couldn’t read them. The letters from his brothers and sisters were however mostly in English and they were an enlightening look at the state of the Peterson household at that time. I transcribed the letters thinking that some day I would attempt to translate them, but I realize now that I never will. What I did will remain after I die, perhaps some descendant of mine will come upon them and continue what I started to do.

In addition to giving a snapshot of the Petersons in about 1900, the papers indicate that my namesake uncle had a troubled time of it in his early adult years. He took this business course from some school down in Des Moines and he was quite unhappy being away from the parental home. I wonder what possessed him to take this course, which contained amongst other things instruction in shorthand. It would have been far more useful to him to have gone to Tobin College as my father did.

One interesting sidelight is that he did make a contact with the college at Ames regarding enrollment there. That is where he should have gone. Probably he did not have a mentor to steer him in that directions. Sometime he went to Gustavus [Adolphus] for a term or two. Perhaps on the basis of that he took the test to be able to teach in one of the country schools that dotted the countryside.

My mother related the incident involving the two of them when he was the teacher and she was a student. On one occasion an agent for a book company came during school hours and my uncle spent time taking to him. My mother was distracted from her assigned work, my uncle noticed this, and when the agent left called on my mother to recite. It was obvious that her attention had not been on her assignment. This was typical of my uncle, he kept an eagle eye on what was going on.

As nearly as I can make out he never did much with the business training he received. He did function in some clerical capacity in connection with the rural school system and with the creamery in Gowrie but that was all. He apparently had some correspondence with an acquaintance from the school in Des Moines but that soon tapered off. The friend tried to get him to find employment in Chicago but I don’t think he ever reached out in that direction. After his forays to Des Moines and St. Peter he returned to the parental home and after that he never really left it.