Ben Peters wrote the following obituary about 20 years ago, and most of it still applies:
(Balboa Beacon, November issue, 2027)
“Man Who Did Not Run Away and Join the Circus Dies”
Ben Peters, of Newport Beach, died last Thursday, at Hoag Hospital, on the same floor where both of his parents had died, years before. No services were held.
His first memory: The Clyde Beatty Circus came to town when he was four — colors and clowns and elephants and beautiful women on high wires — and he decided to run away and join the circus.
He did not. He did live in astonishing times.
During the war — the last war he would see his country win — he was in the San Fernando Valley, back when it was farms as far as you could see.
In the fifties he liked Ike and drove a blue convertible, in which sat a blonde girlfriend. He was in Rome the year “La Dolce Vita” came out, and Paris a year later.
He was a Cold War veteran, a combat photographer in peacetime, so his time was pretty much his own. He moved to San Francisco just in time for the Summer of Love.
His costumes changed by the decades — farm boy, a crewcut, khaki-wearing fifties kid, then Marine fatigues, then suits, then hippie outfits, then professorial corduroy coats with patches, and thereafter just jeans, jeans anywhere, jeans all the time, jeans 24-7.
Marriage (to his longtime partner in crime, Adele), grad school, and a move back east to teach followed.
The seventies brought a child, the eighties brought tenure, and by the time the nineties were over he had completed the trek from University Young Turk to University Old Emeritus, and retired to the family cottage in Newport Beach.
In his latter years he wore Hawaiian shirts, as did every man he knew.
Peters said once: “It’s been one hell of a parade. Rose Bowl floats, cheerleading at midnight in the Roman Coliseum, seeing Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in the same play at Stratford, shaking my head at the spectacle of the American Presidency, when the sanest President of my lifetime related presidentially to Marilyn Monroe, and the second best did not have sex with that woman, and Caribbean beaches at midnight on New Year’s Eve with French fireworks overhead, or just walking down Haight Street in San Francisco in 1967. You want a parade? I’ll show you a parade.”
Peters also said: “You know, I never did run away and join the circus. The circus ran away and joined me. That’s what it felt like. You know?”
Ben wrote this around 2008, and his predictions were pretty close. He had a granddaughter in 2011, whom he adored.
Ben Peters died on Oct. 9, in Santa Barbara, where he went to grad school. He wore Hawaiian shirts until the end.
He is survived by his beloved wife Adele Peters; daughter Sarah Peters Gorman; granddaughter Amelia Gorman; and by so many kind nieces and nephews and in-laws and friends, and really, anyone he met walking through a restaurant.
He’s joining his brothers and parents and friends in a music-filled afterlife, we can only hope.
If you would like to make a contribution to remember Ben, please direct it to this History Department scholarship at West Chester University, where Ben taught for decades:
West Chester University Foundation, in memory of William Bennett Peters. Please make checks payable to WCU Foundation, Memo: In Memory of William Bennett Peters, and mail to 202 Carter Drive, West Chester, PA 19382.
Gifts can also be made through the foundation’s secure website.
We’ll have a party to remember Ben on Sunday, Nov. 10, in Goleta. There will be stories and singing. Please contact Sarah for information. .