As remembered by a son.

The Peters family is a Yale family, and Jack Peters' branch of the family extended to five generations at Yale when my third daughter, Barbara, received her M.D. degree, with honors, in 1979. We trace our origins back to when Andrew Peters came to America from England in 1702 and settled in Andover, Massachusetts. Our family's Yale connection goes back to Jack's grandfather, Thomas McClure Peters, who earned his bachelor's degree from the university in 1841. He became rector of St. Michael's Church in New York. Jack's father, John Punnett Peters, Sr., earned his bachelor's degree at Yale in 1876 and his Doctorate of Divinity in 1895. He was a member of Yale's football team. On August 31, 1881, in Dresden, Germany, he married the daughter of a Southern plantation owner, Gabriel Brooke Forman. Three and a half years earlier, at age 18, she had traveled alone to Berlin to study piano. Jack's mother taught him to enjoy playing the piano, a diversion his friends and family also enjoyed and one that he used for relaxation for all his life. My father (whom I addressed as "Jack" because he disliked the word "father," forbade the use of sir, and hated the name of John on account of its common usage to designate the plumbing facility) was born December 4, 1887, in Philadelphia. Nine months later, his father, a professor of archeology at the University of Pennsylvania, took the family to Dresden for three years. That's when Helena Fischer started 55 years as a live-in nanny to two generations of Peters children. During the three years in Germany, Jack learned both English and German as his native languages. Jack was five when his grandfather died and his father had to abandon his academic career in archaeology to take over as rector of St. Michael's Church. The family moved into the church rectory on West 99th Street in New York City. Jack's interest in politics was inherited. His father was active in the New York social and political issues. (We are told that there were three Episcopal churches in New York: The High Episcopal Church, the Low Episcopal Church, and the Johnny Peters Episcopal Church.) At 12, Jack, the second of six children and the oldest of the three boys, was sent away to a military school, St. John's in Manlius, New York. The four years at St. John's were not his happiest. In his first