The fourth Peters child before Fern, the baby, was born 4 February 1891 and died 23 April 1968. I found out from the Certificate of Delayed Birth Registration that Edward LeRoy Peters and Mary Jane Maher were both born in 1857, Great Grandfather Peters in Wapello, Iowa, and Great Grandmother Peters in Muscatine, Iowa. I put in the following document because it may be a clue to where all the Peters children went for baptism and church.
I had never thought about St. Nicholas in Valentine, though it still has a parish there selling T-shirts online. (Of interest to me was the name of one of the sponsors, a familiar Bassett name, for I went to Norfolk Junior College with Harley Gesiriech, and his older sister, Lola, was a bailiff here in Douglas County District Court while I was a court reporter. And, yes, I think the name on the baptismal certificate is misspelled, as is the corrected maiden name of Great Grandmother Peters.) I knew the family was Roman Catholic, but I also know only Glen stayed in that church. Nellie, Myrtle, and Fern were all Methodists. Forrest is a mystery anyway. Aunt Myrtle is buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Randolph NE, close to the south edge.
The next oldest item for Myrtle is a truly faded photo of Mariaville school children I mentioned much earlier that I include here only because of its frame shape and the writing on the back I put below it. I defy any identification from it but recognize she's somewhere in the picture.
She wore glasses most of her studiously bookish life, so this must be very early and thoroughly representative of her. (And I rather think Aunt Audree looked like her, just judging from this photo.) Most of the family found her formidable--my sisters were certainly intimidated by her--but I always got along well with her, books the strong bond, though she waspishly corrected any errors I made, especially in her favorite subject, history. I still remember her correcting my pronunciation of Armageddon. She gave me a birthday present when I was a young boy, a biography of her hero, Alexander Hamilton. She also willed me her fine H & C Bavaria bone china. Her handwriting--I have her recipe cards and even, I think, the Hamilton biography--was very clear and spidery. Like her brother, she loved to argue and marshalled her reading into a battle platform from which to shoot down fools. Or at least those foolish enough to argue with her.
She was briefly married to Jay Clark Wefso of Stuart, but nowhere in Mom's records are the dates. It must have been an early divorce at a time divorces were still scandalous (which extends up to my childhood). It was one of those episodes whispered about; I remember that. Jay died in 1951 of a stroke and is buried in Stuart. [Great] Aunt Myrtle was always a spinster, despite her short marriage, looking the thin, waspish stereotype of a schoolmarm, which is exactly what she was. She lived over a main-street cafe in Randolph for all her teaching years, the final scan in this entry about that teaching, a small apartment kept briskly clean and neat. Children, including me and later my sisters, sat quietly on chairs during the visits, hoping we didn't stay too long, though she generally served light lunches. I didn't mind, because she had books, but my sisters dreaded those occasions.
She was also not supposed to live so long, for she had leukemia. Her brother, Dr. Glen E. Peters, kept her going with some regimen he thought up. After he died, she moved from Randolph to Center, where Mom gave her the required shots and looked after her, in turn for which she baked us her excellent bread (which recipe I stuck in this blog site long ago, I think) and sometimes other baked goods. I think she enjoyed Center, living in her own house after years of a tiny apartment, having a garden and flowers, finding the natives friendly. But she developed a rapidly growing tumor in the midsection, which looked, startlingly enough, as if she had either swallowed or was pregnant with a basketball. She moved temporarily to a rest home in Pierce and finally died in a Norfolk hospital, years beyond what even her brother expected.
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