Early Life and Family
Peterson was born in Portage, Wisconsin, the son of Anton and Emma Peterson. The eighth of nine children, his father Anton was an immigrant from Sweden who worked as a bartender and barber. Peterson attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he received a B.S. in 1938, working as a dishwasher in the chemistry lab to pay the bills and a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1942. In 1937 he married Lillian Turner, with whom he had four children: R. Glen, Peter J., Kristin P. Havill and Elin P. Sullivan. Lillian died in 1994. He married his second wife, June Jenkins, who had been recently widowed, in 1995. He was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Read more about this topic: Russell W. Peterson
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“... into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“If it had not been for storytelling, the black family would not have survived. It was the responsibility of the Uncle Remus types to transfer philosophies, attitudes, values, and advice, by way of storytelling using creatures in the woods as symbols.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)