“…I remember that experience because my parents were incredibly impressed. Well, he had decided that what worked for me in Williams-at-Home was that I related to people through work, and when he met my father he then understood that because my father was a construction worker, elevator construction, and comes from a very Blue Collar work kind of environment. And I remember after that weekend he said, “Oh, so glad I got to meet your father.” He was like saying now I’m really understanding how I operate, how I related to people was through work. And that’s what I liked about Williams-at-Home is that I was working all the time. [My father] thought this was all Loony Tunes. I mean he didn’t get a chance to go to college and here was his son getting this opportunity to go to a very nice college and he thought I was kind of blowing it and frittering it away. I had long hair, which annoyed him. There wasn’t much that we agreed about back then.

In November, December of ’72, my senior year at Williams, I decided I was going to leave school because Williams wasn’t doing it for me. I had this marvelous experience in the spring of ’72, came back in the summer, took my courses in the fall. I was flunking one course and it wasn’t interesting, so I withdrew from college. And I talked to Bob Gaudino about it and one of the first things he said was “Your father’s going to be very disappointed.” And [Gaudino] was somewhat disappointed but he didn’t disagree with my decision because I just wasn’t interested in the books and the academics. I wanted to get back out into that marvelous world of different people and different cultures and I ended up going to Colorado, living in a little kind of commune with no running water, you know, kind of back to Appalachia or somewhere. And after being there for a couple of months I thought “This was kind of worthless.” This wasn’t like a Williams-at-Home kind of experience, it wasn’t. I was really just wasting time. I wasn’t getting anything done, and I came back to Williams to visit. Well my classmates were now getting ready to graduate in May of ’73, and I kind of decided then, “I think I’m going to try to come back to school,” and I came back the following fall, late fall, and then finished up in the spring of ’74.

I heard about this later. When I said I was leaving school my mother said it devastated my father. He said, “He’ll never finish, he’ll never go back.” And my mother was a woman of faith. She said, “You know, trust in God.” And then when I graduated, he was visibly proud. As stupid and dumb as I was, at least I knew enough to go back and get that diploma.

–Paul Peterson '73