Aunt Laurine

I come at last to the youngest of the Peterson children, my aunt Laurine. Again I know nothing of her early life. She was born in 1904 and the family moved from the farm to the house in Gowrie about 1915. Did she start in country school? Did she have most of her elementary schooling and her high school in the Gowrie school? Her college training was for being a teacher in the elementary grades and she taught at at least one school before ending up in the Dubuque schools.

I have the impression that she was a very competent teacher. During the years she taught in Dubuque she provided housing for my sisters Clarice and Vivian while the attended the University of Dubuque. I can recall driving the 1938 Plymouth that my father bought to replaces the old Essex along Highway 20 between Fort Dodge and Dubuque conveying Clarice and Vivian to aunt Laurine’s apartment.

Aunt Laurine was to me a person who was gone most of the year at her teaching job, coming back to Gowrie at the holidays at the end of the year and during the summer. I believe that she taught in the Bible school that was held each summer. Eventually she ended her career as an elementary teacher and became an instructor at Gustavus Adolphus as a teacher of future teachers. She bought a home in St. Peter and our family spent one night in it on our way from the Twin Cities to Gowrie. Maybe she used her inheritance from the Peterson estate when it was finally settled to buy her home in St. Peter.

Aunt Laurine was the only one of the Peterson daughters to learn to drive a car. I think it was necessary in her teaching at Gustavus. I never rode with her but I have heard from relatives who did that she was not a very good driver. However she did not have any accidents that I recall.

My mother on one occasion attempted to drive. I think my father was with her assisting her in the learning process. The account I have heard is that she ran into a cow that was occupying the roadway and that was the end of her driving career. Was the cow hurt? I don’t know. Was the car damaged? Again I don’t know.

Aunt Laurine spent her last years at Friendship Haven, a Methodist home in Fort Dodge. There may have been a buy-in fee, I don’t know. There was a monthly charge and I remember Vincent saying (he took care I think of her funds in her declining years) that she worried that her money would run out. Actually according to Vincent they were depleted just as she died at the age of about 82.

While at Friendship Haven she did for me the translation from Swedish into English the letters we got from some relative in Sweden. The relative had saved letters to Sweden written in the late 1870s and early 1880s by my grandparents. I am including these letters as an appendix to this account that I am typing.