Today we have an interview from one of our very own board members and good friends Jack Peterson. We all know him well from his work on the board and most of us know that he’s related to Rhonda and Jpeg. Now read on to learn more about him.
Q: What brought you to KUUF?
Jack: I’ve been a UU for over thirty years and I was looking for a UU fellowship close to where I live. KUUF is the closest one.
Q: Do you have a favorite memory of your life?
Jack: I have to say my first snow machine trip from Chevak, Alaska to the neighboring village and back. We were taking the trip for two reasons. First of all, Ken Brown (a fellow teacher in Chevak) had a new snow machine and wanted to try it out. The second reason was we’d had an airplane that had crashed on our runway in Chevak and we weren’t getting groceries. The nearest store that had milk and eggs was the neighboring village of Hooper Bay.
I was the passenger on the way over to Hooper Bay and Ken let me drive on the way home. When we got to Hooper Bay we visited some friends of his who were also teachers and then did our shopping. The sun was setting very early because it was in January and we headed back home about 3 o’clock that afternoon in the gathering darkness.
Now because it snowed so much (several feet deep) they didn’t have roads out where we were and they didn’t have regular road signs either. What they did instead was mark a trail with long poles through the snow. The poles had color-coded reflectors on them which indicated which village we were headed toward.
On the way home we came to a fork in the trail. On one side of the pole was a yellow reflector and on the other side was a blue one. I stopped, turned to Ken and asked, “Which way do I go?” He wearily shook his head and said, “I don’t think it makes any difference.” I was so tired I didn’t question his judgment and so I turned right (that seemed to be the natural thing to do).
It was a new snow machine and Ken didn’t know how to take care of it yet. One of the things you have to do with a two-stroke engine is put oil into the gas mix so the pistons don’t freeze up. He hadn’t done that, so we rode on for several miles and all the sudden his machine just glided to a stop.
So we were out in the middle of nowhere with a broken down snow machine. After a few minutes we saw a headlight coming toward us. We waved at them to stop and they let us climb in back of their already crowded sled. We assumed they were on their home to Chevak. Instead they lived in the neighboring village of Scammon Bay.
By that time it was very dark so it was decided to put us up in teacher housing for the night and Ken and I chartered a plane back to Chevak the next morning. They fed us dinner when we got there and put us up in teacher housing. Anyway, we spent the night in Scammon Bay instead of back home in Chevak.
I earned my Yupik nickname of Tun’tuk which is moose in Yupik because the man who brought us in to Scammon Bay fed me a little bit of moose stew while sleeping arrangements were being made and the teachers who let me stay with them fed some moose ribs. We chartered a plane back to Chevak the next day and got home.
The moral of the story is: When somebody says it doesn’t matter when you ask directions at a fork in the road, don’t accept that as a passible answer.
Q: What did/do you do for a career?
Jack: I’ll tell you what I did most of my career and then when we get down to questions 10, 11, and 12 I’ll tell you what I did before my career.
I was a teacher.
Joey: What did you teach?
Jack: I started teaching 3rd grade in a small town called Earlimart, California. It was called Earlimart because you could drive up from LA and get produce earlier or something like that. They were mostly Mexicans going back and forth with the season. We were instructed not to cooperate with Immigration and things like that. Some kids would go back to Mexico with their parents for migrant farm work purposes. I had one kid I really liked and she really liked my class but when she came back from Mexico my class was so full that she was placed in a different 3rd class.
Then I taught Special education in Bakersfield for six years, 1st and 2nd grade mostly. After that I moved to Alaska and taught special education up there. I ended my teaching career teaching English as a Second Language in Korea.
Q: What are now or have been some of your best talents or achievements?
Jack: One thing I’m fairly good at is distilling lengthy conversations down to a few sentences. My description of my Alaskan adventure, however, was a little wordy.
Q: Did you come from any other faith tradition? What was it, and how did it affect you?
Jack: I came from a combination Presbyterian/Methodist tradition. My maternal grandmother was a preacher’s kid, and she took that stuff very seriously. She was sure I would see Armageddon in my lifetime. “Wars and rumors of wars” she would say as her proof.
My paternal grandfather was a devout Methodist and neither one of my parents were religious and thought my brother and I should be. So they packed us off to Sunday school every week and they stayed home to have some quality kid-free time.
Q: What events or projects at KUUF do you like to take part in?
Jack: I’ve enjoyed my experience on the board but I’m looking forward to being an ex-board member because I’ve been on there for three years. I also enjoy being a chalice circle facilitator. It’s the only church some of the people in the circle have or want. Some will go to Chalice Circle but they won’t come to our church because they “don’t want to be preached at.” I said, “KUUF probably isn’t like the church you grew up in.” They’d pop in every once and a while to check us on out on a Sunday and then pop out again.
Q: Who or what has had the biggest impact on your life?
Jack: This is going to sound corny but it’s my parents. That’s because they taught me to think for myself and don’t follow the crowd. I don’t regret that I’ve tried to follow their advice and I thank them for that.
Q: What is one piece of knowledge that you would consider indispensable?
Jack: I consider it to be: Choose your battles wisely. That’s one of my touchstones. I don’t consider myself to be a wimp but I don’t jump into every fray that I see coming along. Especially if it’s not going to benefit me or people I care about.
Q: What most appeals to you about UUism at this point in your life?
Jack: I like that it’s a very large tent and if I change my beliefs I can still fit under that tent. Unless I decide to become a Klansman I think I’ll be UU for the rest of my life. I like the flexibility of the belief system, the fact that it’s a non-creedal belief system.
Q: What is a weird piece of trivia about you?
Jack: My mother loved me dearly but she had a very strange way of showing it. Every year on my birthday without prompting she’d talk about the three times I almost died before I was six. The bad arm I have is because I got stuck in the birth canal and I was turning blue then the doctor pulled me out.
At four I fell down into a hole on the farm where we lived. It was a septic tank and fortunately I was on side where the washing machine water went. After rescuing me, my father took his tractor and filled the septic tank with dirt the next day. Right next to it on the other side of a partition another chamber was filled to the top with water and human waste; if I had fallen in there I probably would have drowned.
Finally when I was five I was an unwilling participant in an encephalitis epidemic. I had hallucinations and a very high fever. I don’t know how high it really was but the hospital staff rubbed me down with alcohol to help cool me down.
My mother would tell me I must have had a Guardian Angel watching over me. My feeling was if had an angel watching over me he, she or it should have been fired for letting me get so close to dying!
Q: What is the most interesting/unusual job you’ve done? / What is something that most people at KUUF don’t know about you?
Jack: I used to be an embalmer. I went into it deliberately.
So when I went to college I wanted to be a teacher but I was part of the baby boom and there was a glut on the teaching market, so I’d taken agriculture in high school and I got A’s in it so I decided I’d be an Agriculture major and try to teach Ag in high school. I did well in academics but I did horribly in the mechanics part.
So I thought: I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t want to keep spinning my wheels here in college. So I dropped out. I went up to the counseling center and looked for trade schools because my brother went to a trade school and he was a beautician for several years. I thought I don’t want to do that, but let’s see what else they have.
The San Francisco College of Mortuary Science just jumped off the page at me. I had never thought of doing that but after I read it I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I talked to people and one of the people knew one of the local morticians through a lodge and so I went over to talk to him. He allowed me to observe an embalming process, which was technically illegal, but I thought ‘I’m going to do this, so I did it. I also thought one day I could easily pull myself away from this and go back to college once I figured out what I wanted to do. I did become an embalmer but it was hard to quit a full-time job and live off of dwindling savings. I did it anyway.
I went back to college where I met my wife. She wanted to be an ESL teacher and it just kind of went from there. Most people don’t know I was an embalmer between 1973 and1980.
I also thought that it wouldn’t be so cool when I got older. One of the things I disliked the most was that I was on call at night and they’d wake me up in the middle of the night to go pick up a body and bring it back to the mortuary. A couple of times there were three calls in a night and I didn’t get any sleep at all. There I was in my mid twenties and I thought: This doesn’t cut it now what’s it going to be like when I’m 50 or 60? So I thought: I’ve got to get out of this line of work.
Q: What has brought you comfort or entertainment or both during the coronavirus shutdown?
Jack: I have a stack of old DVDs and one of them was Pleasantville. I’ve been watching that over and over again because it’s kind of an allegory. I had a roommate who wanted to live in the black and white part of it. We each had a health crisis as a child. I had my encephalitis and he had a stroke when he was 7. He had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop and when it finally did he threw a blood clot up into his brain and he a stroke.
He was always looking for permanence and stability. As an example you know those Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks that had the ring binders? He bought one and to make sure it was permanent he was going to put re-enforcers rings on all of the holes on the pages so they wouldn’t tear out. And then when he was almost done he picked it up and the pages went everywhere!
He was the one who steered me toward Unitarianism in the first place because he accused me of being one. I said” I don’t think a God that’s all powerful, all loving, and all knowing could condemn most of humanity to Hell” and he said, “That sounds like a Unitarian!” I tucked that away in my memory bank and when I went looking for a church I visited a UU Fellowship and sure enough that's what I was and still am.