Vernor L. Peterson

     His name was Vernor L. Peterson, but no one ever called him anything but Pete.  To us, he was Uncle Pete.

     I learned early on that he didn’t care too much for kids.  He and Aunt Lizzie had no kids, and I think for the most part, they were happy about that.  I remember a conversation between Pete and my mother where she was encouraging him to have children.  Pete said soto voce with a devilish smile, “But Annabel, I’m trying, I’m trying!”

     Nevertheless, we were always happy to have Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Pete visit, which they did every year or two.  Considering that they usually drove from California where they lived in a suburb of San Francisco, Redwood City, their visits were fairly frequent.  Grandma Thistlewood was still going, so Lizzie liked to call on her as often as she could.

     I remember a couple of visits when they were driving a new, at least on the 1957 visit, Ford.  Beside the fact that it was new, it seemed remarkable because it had seat belts! 

      In another visit, they drove a Karmann Ghia with the name “Pete” printed on the left side of the “trunk”, probably the engine hood on that outfit, and “Liz” on the right side.  In retrospect, that couldn’t have been a very comfortable trip.

     Pete was a pilot and he always talked of flying into Stapleton and renting a “small bird” as he called it and flying to Limon.  That excited me since I was fascinated by flying and airplanes., but that trip never happened.

     Pete was a WWII veteran, and I think it was in the service that he and Aunt Lizzie met.  She was in the WACS, I think.  Somewhere we have separate pictures of Pete and Lizzie in military flight caps.  I’m not sure what role Pete played.  I don’t think he was a pilot.

     I do remember a slide show once when we went to Denver to visit them at the Olson household.  I can’t remember much about the slide show because as I often do when things are on the big screen, I went to sleep.  But I do remember one of the slides was a picture of Pete standing by the open door of some kind of military airplane in flight.

    Pete worked at the Hiller Helicopter factory.  He was very handy, knowing a lot about electronics.  I remember him working on our television.  He bravely, in my view, took the back off and started meddling around with wires and tubes.  When he replaced the back, the TV worked great.

     I remember him telling Dad that whenever you were digging around among the tubes and wires, always keep one hand in your hip pocket.  That way, if you did run into 110 volts, it wouldn’t  cross your heart and kill you, maybe. 

     Pete looked askance at any of us who used a pair of pliers on a nut or bolt head.  “Anyone who used a pair of pliers on a nut at Hiller Helicopter would get fired,” he declared.  Well, nobody got fired at the farm.

     Pete was a great jokester, both the teller of jokes and a practical joker.  One of the jokes he told was of a Native American who came home from a hitch in the navy with a bad case of dysentery.  Things hadn’t changed much on the reservation and in the middle of the night when the young man had to visit the outhouse, he had a bad accident due to being unable to see in the dark.  Having been an electrician in the navy, he headed to town the next morning and bought the supplies to bring power to the outhouse.  He installed a light therein.  Thus, he became the first Navajo to wire a head for a reservation.

    That joke is dated, as no one now wires anything.  Cell phones for that job.

    Pete had a favorite liquor store that had jokes on cards, cartoon-like.  I remember two, one showing a deer hunter squatting beside a bush with his pants down around his ankles.  He was squeezing and trying to get  his business done.  On the other side of the bushes was another hunter on full alert.  The caption read, “Shh!  I thought I heard a buck snort!”

     Another one was in four panels.  In the first one, a guy is sitting in a chair holding a newspaper, with alarm and disgust on his face.  His big dog has his leg raised on the front of the couch.  In the next panel he is leading the dog to the park.  In the third panel, the guy, with his back to the viewer, is obviously urinating on a tree in the park. He is gesturing to the dog, this is where you do it.  In the last panel, the guy is once again in his chair with all kinds of alarm on his face.  The dog is standing upright on his back legs, like a man, taking a leak on the couch. 

     On the practical joke side, Pete had a sort of arrow with a U-like wire separating the tip from the feathered end of the shaft.  He could put the U on his body or head and it looked like he was impaled with an arrow.

     Many times, we kids were called on to assist him with his practical joke.  I remember one time when he wanted an old, short pencil that was dispensable.  He cut it in two and used adhesive tape, the white kind in the medicine cabinet, to wrap the cut ends.  He got the thickness of the tape just right so that he could stick the taped ends into his ears and keep them there.  It looked like he had a pencil sticking through his head.   

     Another time we assisted him, he asked for a piece of cotton.  He wetted it and tucked it out of sight into the joint of his little finger on his right hand.  He picked on a kid who wasn’t privy to the cotton wad.  He used the first two fingers of his right hand to be a bunny rabbit looking for something.  He crawled up the thumb of the unsuspecting victim, then the index finger, and on, always looking for something but never finding it until it came to the tip of the pinkie.  At that point, he squeezed the cotton wad and heaved a sigh of relief.  The water trickled down the poor kid’s hand and Pete exclaimed that that was what the little bunny was looking for!

    One of the reasons Pete liked to come to Colorado was what he called “Colorado Kool Aid,” a bottle or can of Coors beer.  In those days, Coors was pretty much confined to the state of Colorado.

    I suppose today, Pete would be classified as an alcoholic.  He would drink beer all afternoon and have a Seagram’s 7 & 7 in the evening and never show any signs of inebriation.  In Pete’s defense, it was his vacation when we saw him.

     The last time I saw Pete, we stopped in San Francisco on our way back from visiting Mother-in-Law in Hawaii.  He and Lizzie both had to go to work during the day.  He insisted we drive his brand-new Oldsmobile to do the tourist thing in San Francisco.  I really tried to resist, but I lost.

      I wanted to go ride the street cars around town, but they were out of the service at that time, so we drove around town trying to follow the sea gull signs that marked the tourist routes.  I was terrified that I would put a dent in his new car.  I didn’t, but it wasn’t a whole lot of fun for me.  It included a wrong turn and a trip across the bay to visit Oakland.

     Pete had a bout with colon cancer.  I don’t think he ever fully recovered from that.  His flying and travelling days were over.  We never saw him again.

     I had a lot of “favorite” uncles, and Pete certainly was one.