Richard Widmark: A Princeton legend

Lester Peterson, Richard Widmark, Tom Best and Gail Caster graduated June 10, 1932, from Princeton High School. They had spent seven years together in grade school, junior high and high school and were now ready to face and try out this wide wonderful world. They could not imagine what would be in store for each of them. Real life is always stranger than fiction, with more twists than any writer could imagine.

Lester Peterson leaves Princeton for college, Sept. 8, 1932, to attend Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., where he will be studying engineering. While attending Purdue he meets Alberta Roethemeyer, who is a student there also. She is the daughter of Edwin and Albertina Roethemeyer, born Sept. 24, 1915. They are married May 15, 1934, in Frankfort, Ind. They have a son, Stanley, born April 2, 1935. Lester and family continued to live in Lafayette through the end of the year in 1935.

Lester does not continue with his college education to graduation though; he has a family now. He had two years at Purdue and Alberta just one. He tries several different ways to make a living, even selling pickles he packages to sell to taverns and small restaurants. That doesn’t quite make it, and they move to Princeton in 1936, where he begins farming on one of the properties that his father, Albert, buys for him and his sister, Ruth, just south of Princeton on March 1 and June 27, in 1936.

Lester and Alberta have a second child, a daughter, Susan, born Nov. 28, 1940. Albert buys his daughter, Gladys, a farm Nov. 29, 1941. Albert and Sophia wanted their children close in the Princeton area. They wanted their grandchildren close too. They wanted to enjoy and know them in their later years.

Lester’s father, Albert H. Peterson dies on April 15, 1949. There is more grief to come. It is an emotionally tough period for Lester from 1952 to 1955. It is harvest time in October of 1952. Lester is in the field picking corn. The picker is jammed, and he tries to get it free. Shutting it down will make it harder to do, even though it is the right thing to do. He leaves it running, and when trying to undo the jam, his hand gets caught in the picker. He was trying to pull the tangled corn stalks out. He kicks the chain off with his booted foot. His calmness in the situation is the only thing that saves him from more injury than he does suffer. He loses all four fingers on his left hand. He is flown to Palms of Pasadena Hospital in Chicago for medical attention and hopefully some type of recovery. A surgery involving some of the tissue from his abdomen is necessary to restore some use of his hand. His hand is fused to his abdomen, then removed with newly-bonded flesh, folded over the severed fingers. He will have just his thumb and a stump to continue life with. It is not pretty, but it is functional, and he goes on.

His sister Gladys’ husband, Morris, dies on Jan. 18, 1953. Lester’s mother, Sophia, dies just days later on Jan. 25, 1953, and his loving wife, Alberta, who has been fighting breast cancer for two years starting in 1951, passes away Oct. 31, 1953. Ten days later his mother-in-law, Albertina Roethemeyer, dies suddenly. Life is beyond hard.

Lester is broken hearted, heavy with grief, and it seems the whole world is pressing heavily on his shoulders. He could not have imagined all of this. His daughter Susan, just 13, finds her father almost to tears on the telephone one day shortly after Alberta’s death. He is having a conversation with an old friend and classmate — Richard Widmark. Widmark listens patiently to Lester and consoles his good friend as best that he can. He has been very involved with making 12 movies during this same period that Lester’s life is testing him to the limit; but Widmark is just a phone call away, takes the time, and is available for his friend and classmate. Friendships are more important than making movies.

Lester slowly gets back to living, and he is still farming in 1954. He carries on with life. He then marries for a second time on the May 7 to Helen (Long) Anderson, the widow of Lloyd Anderson who died in 1950. They are living at 536 S. Euclid in Princeton. Helen has a daughter, Carolyn “Candy” Anderson, who is now the stepsister of Stanley and Susan. She is the same age as Stanley.

More tragedy finds the Peterson family. Carolyn is on a trip to Italy as part of a tour in 1955, takes a side trip from the tour, and is involved in a car accident while seeing the sights, where the driver is killed. Carolyn sustains many injuries herself and is in a cast from under her arms down to her waist. She cannot even board a plane to return home and has to travel by ship to get back to the states. She has a long recovery.

Richard Widmark loses his younger brother, Donald Widmark, who dies Dec. 22, 1955. He had watched Donald slowly slip away in life ever since being released as a POW in World War II, where he suffered a head injury that eventually causes his death. Lester phones his friend with his condolences.

Lester retires in 1961, and his son, Stanley, continues with the farm, though Lester could still have a hand in it. His daughter, Susan, marries Steve Barlow, June 5, 1961, in Manhattan, Kan. Lester knew how to combine business with pleasure, and he would make trips to Kansas to buy steers for the farm and then visit Susan, Steve and their growing family, that eventually is blessed with four children — Jay, Sara, Rebekah and Rachel.

Lester managed the Princeton Sealing Wax Co. in 1964, that Helen inherited, and later was the president in 1976. Richard Widmark visited Princeton several times in the 1960s. He reconnected with Lester in August of 1967, and they talked of old times in high school. Lester had tried to get Richard to come home that same year during the 35th class reunion of the Class of 1932, but obligations with his movie career did not make it possible. Peterson went to the radio station in Princeton and had a telephone conversation with Widmark taped for the reunion. Widmark was in California for his end of the conversation. They played it at the reunion. It was only bad timing that kept Richard Widmark from making the reunion that year.

Lester Peterson and his brother-in-law, Glenn Seidel, owned the Wyanet Elevator in the 1960s but eventually sold it. Lester was on the board of directors of both the First State Bank of Princeton and the Wyanet Mutual Insurance Co. in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Lester Peterson died on Oct. 28, 1978. His second wife, Helen Peterson, continued to live at 536 S. Euclid until her death, March 11, 1999. Richard Widmark left a note in Helen’s mailbox, after Lester’s death, when she was not at home one day. It is not known what it said, but it is known that it was left. There was something really there with Richard Widmark and Lester Peterson. Real friendships never end. Widmark still remembered his old friend when he visited Princeton that one last time in the early 1980s, and put the note in Helen Peterson’s mailbox. Susan (Peterson) Barlow, Lester’s daughter from his first marriage to Alberta Roethemeyer, still lives in Princeton as do all of her four children. Her husband Steve Barlow, who farmed, had a quick wit and the same fortitude against adversity as Lester, died Jan. 10, 2014.

You think you know, but you never really know what’s around the next corner. I’ll have more Richard Widmark next time.