[Great] Uncle Glen tended to dominate conversations and not just because he was a doctor. The Peters family was an informal debating society, very literate and literary, and their red hair stereotypically warned that they would have something to say, especially Uncle Glen. He was born 8 July 1884, living until 4 December 1970. I am tempted to call him cantankerous, but that makes him seem sour, when he simply loved to argue and would even play the devil's advocate for the game. Verbally aggressive. persuasively so. He favored politics; the Peters family were Democrats, which meant they didn't lack opposition in Nebraska.
I have no idea how old he was in this, but it is our oldest photo of him. He never changed, though that same hairdo grew white. He had the same sharp cheekbones prized by Hollywood and modeling studios when I stayed with him briefly in late 1969, the year before he died, in Randolph, where he was Dr. Peters forever. I had come home from Europe with kidney stones and had to find a job, for I had planned on finding work over there. The high school English teacher was gone for some reason I don't remember; the superintendent happened to be a jock I'd graduated from Wayne State (NE) with; we had mutual emergencies: he needed a substitute, and I needed a job; being Dr. Peter's great nephew helped; and so I had the most unhappy teaching job ever for three weeks. But I didn't stay locked in all day as the students and other faculty did, because Uncle Glen interceded and wanted to have his meals with me. Or something like that. His name and influence definitely helped, as well as the lodging, though he tended to talk endlessly at me.
He looks around the same age in this one, with "Glen to Mother" written on the back, which means that Fern got several of her mother's collection.
He was a teacher before he was a doctor. Apparently contemporaneously with the above photo is this postcard with probably Great Grandmother Peters' spidery handwriting on the end: "School, Where Glen Was Princibal (sic) in 1906 & 1907." The sign below the bell tower says "ORCHARD SCHOOL," doubtlessly meaning Orchard, Nebraska. We have his Creighton University Medical School Commencement Program from 1911, a bit worse for the wear, one corner's pages chewed away, though otherwise a fine historical document. Creighton lies on the north edge of downtown Omaha, a powerhouse locally in law and medicine--and sports, the same family name given to the first town south of Center, my hometown, in northeast Nebraska.
Here he is, next to his mother, Mary Jane Maher Peters.
Just for the interest in how much he looked a paternal Peters, here is his father's brother, John, born 16 March 1873. (Edward Leroy, Glen's father, was born 9 October 1857, as a reminder.) On the back his mother wrote, "My old bachelor son John." Actually, according to Mom's records, John married a Gladys Spidle and died 17 June 1949, as much as she has about him.
And here is "Dr. G. E.," Fern's writing, as I've noted, in his Army Medical Corps uniform.
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