Library of Congress Interview with Mr. Robert B. Petersen Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Information Series ROBERT B. PETERSEN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: February 16, 2001 Copyright 2008 ADST [Note: This interview was not edited by Mr. Petersen] Q: Today is February 16, 2001. This is an interview with Robert B. Petersen. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. The name Petersen, is that Scandinavian? PETERSEN: It's Danish. My father came from a large family. I think he had nine siblings. By the time he died in 1984, he was probably the only one spelling it with an “sen” and the others after the post office, Social Security, whatever, made it “son,” they said, “Why bother?” My cousins and uncles and so forth ended up spelling it differently. But that's what was on my birth certificate. Q: Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? PETERSEN: Sure. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, at St. John Hospital on the west side in Lakewood just west of the Cleveland boundary, on July 22, 1942. The war was underway. I was conceived just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. I grew up in Cleveland for the first Interview with Mr. Robert B. Petersen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001621 Library of Congress six years. Both my parents were born in the United States. All four of my grandparents were born in different locations in Europe. Q: Let's go back to the origins. Where were your grandparents born? PETERSEN: On my father's side, both grandparents were born in Denmark. Their older children were born in Denmark, their eldest son and eldest daughter. I believe the other eight children were born in the U.S. On my mother's side, I'm not really sure. The naturalization certificate for my grandfather says he was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which could mean anything. My mother tells me that one time she asked him what they were and he said, “Oh, don't bother trying to explain it to people. Americans would never understand.” She understood some Serbo-Croatian, not well enough to really respond with more than a few words, but she said she certainly understood it when it was spoken around her house. So that's a hint. I do know that she had a half-brother who was living in what then became Yugoslavia. But there was no particular effort ever to maintain ties or dig into that family history. Q: On your mother's side, was she from the same area? PETERSEN: I'm not sure, and my grandmother on my mother's side died in the flu epidemic in 1918, as did some of my mother's siblings. My grandfather on my mother's side died six years before I was born, so I had no contact with the family. My mother's family was broken up, put into foster care and so forth. It really was rather difficult to maintain connections there. Q: What type of work was your father doing? PETERSEN: He was a farmer. That was what he loved. He grew up on a farm. His grandfather was a mason, a builder. But he was also a farmer. I have the feeling that he was a farmer full-time and supplemented the farm income with work as a mason. Interview with Mr. Robert B. Petersen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001621 Library of Congress Q: So often that was the case, particularly during the winter. PETERSEN: Yes. But my father grew up on a farm. He had an older brother who became a farmer. All of his other brothers went into other occupations. But he really had his heart set on farming. After he got out of the service in '45, he went to work with his older brother. In 1948, after we had lived in Cleveland for six years, we finally moved to a small village west of Cleveland in northeastern Ohio. He began farming on his own. So, I also grew up on a farm. Q: How about your mother? Was she from farming stock, too? PETERSEN: No. Her father was a carpenter, but I don't believe he ever was employed by others as a carpenter. He built some houses, sold them and rented them. But he was a coal miner in southeastern Ohio. Q: Many people from Yugoslavia went into the mines in those days. PETERSEN: He was a coal miner. It was a very hard, very difficult life from what my mother has described to me. But one of the things that my mother remembers that would probably describe my grandfather's outlook and efforts is John L. Lewis sitting at their kitchen table. Her father was part of the effort to organize miners in southeastern Ohio. Q: John L. Lewis was the head of the United Mine Workers, a major figure in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Did either your mother or father have any higher education? PETERSEN: No. Q: What about your father and the military? What did he do? Interview with Mr. Robert B. Petersen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001621 Library of Congress PETERSEN: While he was living in Cleveland in the early '40s, he was a licensed engineer of stationary power plants. I think he was working for the McGee Chemical Company at the time. He told me the story of having gotten his induction notice. He reported and he said as the men passed through the line, every other inductee was told to go to the right and he was going into the Army and every other one was told to go to the left and being told he was going in the Navy. When he stepped forward, they told him, “Over there. You're going to the Army.” He said, “No, that doesn't make sense. I know how to operate stationary power plants. I'm a licensed engineer. I could at least do something useful in the Navy.” They said, “All right, you're in the Navy.” That's how he got into the Navy. I don't think he actually ever put any of that civilian skill to work in the Navy. He ended up working in Navy salvage in different locations in the Pacific, at Pearl Harbor and several of the islands in the Pacific, salvaging vessels. He was enlisted, of course. He never talked much about his naval service, very little. He told me a few times about riding a seagoing tugboat that had to go from the Hawaiian Islands back through Panama for some reason. He told me it was a very unpleasant trip, bounced around a bit. Not that he ever refused to talk about his naval service, but it never seemed to be anything of great interest to him. Q: By the time you were six, you moved to a small farming community. What was the name of the place? PETERSEN: Avon. It was in Lorain County, which abutted Cuyahoga County. L-O-R-A-I-N was French. The village in which I grew up was sometimes referred to as “French Creek,” but it was actually the town or the village of Avon. There was a creek running through the center of Avon that was called French Creek. It was an area that was part of the French area of exploration, not settlement so much, but just trapping and exploring. But none of the settlers who settled in Lorain County that I'm aware of traced their origins back to France. Q: Did you have brothers and sisters? Interview with Mr. Robert B. Petersen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001621 Library of Congress PETERSEN: I have one sister. She was born in Cleveland just before we moved to Avon, the summer of '48. She is six years younger than I. That's probably something I shouldn't talk about [laughter]. She probably would prefer I never reveal her age. But I have a younger sister and she was born in Cleveland before I moved to Avon. So the two of us grew up on the farm. My father was a full-time farmer, but like most farmers, certainly in that area, he supplemented his income with different occupations during the winter season. My mother, as a farm wife, did a lot of work at his side on the land. Q: Did you all, particularly you, the young man and older than your sister, get involved in a lot of farm work? PETERSEN: Yes. I had household chores, everything from carrying in the coal and so forth, from probably about age seven or so onward. Regular weekly or daily chores that I would carry out. I never really worked on the farm full-time until I was probably 11. Then my summers were full-time work. I never really spent a lot of time during the school year working on the farm. Sometimes I would help out in the evenings and weekends, but never to the extent that it interfered with schoolwork. I actually can only recall probably one time when I was in high school where my dad asked me to stay home and work on a school day because he needed some help for a day or so. But other than that, I was allowed to play sports after school, things like that. Q: What about at home? I realize that being a farm family, particularly your parents were very busy.