Jeanne Isabel Peterson

Jeanne Isabel Stouffer was born to Bercia Mae (Todd) and Albert Leslie Stouffer on April 5, 1929, the youngest of 6 siblings (plus another who died in infancy). She was born and raised in Shell Lake, Wisconsin, graduating from Shell Lake High School in 1947, nine years after her youngest sibling, Robert. Music was her favorite subject, and she lettered in Band, playing the trombone.

She graduated from Wisconsin State Teacher’s College, Superior, Wisconsin, in 1951 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Music and a minor in Biology. She taught Band, Vocal Music, and 8th Grade English in Milroy Minnesota from 1951 to 1952. On Feb 9th, 1952 Jeanne married Corporal Arlyn Peterson and moved to Rapid City South Dakota where he was stationed with the Air Force. After Arlyn was discharged they moved to Milwaukee, so he could get electronics training at the technical school there. Then they moved to Minneapolis.

In 1954, they had a son, Jay David, and the following year a daughter, Kaye Jeanne. In the summer of 1961 the couple divorced, and Jeanne moved with the kids to Shell Lake, Wisconsin, where Jeanne worked as a switchboard operator for the phone company.

In 1962 Jeanne received a teaching certificate for the State of Arizona, and moved the family to the small town of Coolidge, Arizona while she taught elementary school music at nearby Florence, where she was well-liked by her students. In 1963 she received a Junior High School teaching certificate for California, but moved the family to Fridley, Minnesota. In the summer of 1963, she attended summer school at the U of M and was certified to teach Music, English, and Biology in Minnesota. She worked as a secretary through Kelly Girls, Inc., working at companies like Northrup King Seeds and FMC Northern Ordnance Division.

Jeanne moved to Golden Valley for a couple years during a short-lived marriage, but then moved back to Fridley where the kids had friends in the Spring Lake Park school district. She worked at State Farm Insurance, then as personal secretary to Dr. John Oman, Senior Pastor at the large Wesley United Methodist Church in Minneapolis until he retired in 1976. She enjoyed working on a personal basis with very many communing church members and visitors to the counseling center.

She was a secretary at the Anoka County Sheriff’s Department and did volunteer work at the Fridley Convalescent Home. In 1981 she took workshops to update her tutoring skills for reading and writing. She volunteered these skills for the Metro North Adult Continuing Education Project. In the ‘90s she wrote letters to troops in Iraq as part of a soldier support campaign. She participated in anti- war protests. Her final regular non-volunteer job was at Hennepin County Child Protection Services, where she spent over a decade and became good friends with many of her co-workers.

Jeanne Peterson was a strong woman who believed in doing the right thing. When tornadoes struck the neighborhood in May 1965, we took in a family from the nearby trailer court which had been devastated. When I was a high-school kid, a friend of mine was having trouble at home: he stayed with us until things settled down. She did a good job of raising us kids by herself on a meager wage, instilling a strong working-class ethic, love of proper grammar, novels, and poetry, and making sure that we went to college. She belonged to the Hennepin County Poetry group since the early ‘70s and had won workshop awards and gotten poems published in magazines. Until she cracked her ninth vertebrae at 88 in 2017, she walked her dog every day, heat, rain, or snow and cold. She supported UN anti-torture and landmine reclamation programs, the Animal Humane Society, the World Wildlife Federation, the Salvation Army, and conservation organizations like the Izaak Walton League.

She drove a manual transmission car and visited her nieces and nephews in or around Shell Lake many times a year. Before her bout of surgeries, she would frequently go camping in a tent, besides making annual trips with friends to Texas, Arizona, or California. She loved music -especially classical, and would try to attend several concerts every year. She was a staunch Democrat her whole life. She joined the protest against the artificially high cost of medical drugs in the US.

Because she had spent so many years running a household on her own, she could be at times stubborn or uncompromising, yet she loved her family dearly –from her folks, siblings, and children to her nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. She made many close and lasting friendships, and she kept in contact with most of them until her memory started to slip. She tried to keep up with the news of what was going on politically, locally, culturally and internationally. Though she may not have always understood it, she was always curious and open to learning about the science of how things work. We are proud of the life our mother lived.

She lived in her own home until on April16 when she went to the hospital for rehydration from spending hours on the floor the day before due to not taking her blood pressure medication. Then she cracked her hip at rehab, had an abdominal blockage, and more rehab. In the wee hours of September 16, she died in her sleep after suffering a stroke at bedtime the evening before at The Walker Plaza memory care apartment she had been in since June 8. She was 92. At this time, the place and date for a memorial service have not been determined. –Jay & Kaye Peterson