An autobiographical fragment

Last updated on: June 5, 2025 at 4:50 pm by Dan Peterson

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An autobiographical fragment 2025-06-05T16:50:49-06:00 Dan Peterson

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While I was growing up in the greater Los Angeles area, this was “my” temple. And this is where, finally, my parents were sealed together for time and all eternity, and where my brother and I were sealed to them. I’m profoundly grateful for that. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

Newly posted on the comatose and never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation: The Temple: Plates, Patterns, & Patriarchs: “Ancient Israelite Temple Ritual through the Telescope of Restoration Scripture,” written by David M. Calabro:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in The Temple: Plates, Patterns, & Patriarchs, edited by Stephen D. Ricks and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/the-temple-plates-patterns-patriarchs/. For video and audio recording of this conference talk, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2022-temple-on-mount-zion-conference/videos/calabro/.

“One of the most remarkable things about Joseph Smith’s revelations of ancient scripture is how they embody a complex understanding that is consistent with what we know of ancient texts. Just as ancient libraries contained multiple versions of the same text, so do the scriptures of the Restoration. Just as ancient texts reveal multiple layers of transmission, so too do the scriptures of the Restoration. Nowhere is this complexity more clearly evident than in Joseph Smith’s revelations corresponding to the first six chapters of Genesis. “I wish to go back to the beginning,” said the Prophet, “to the morn of creation. There is the starting point for us to look to.” This was in the King Follett discourse in Nauvoo, not long before his martyrdom. By that time, Joseph Smith had revisited the early chapters of Genesis no less than five times, each time yielding a different version.”

“The San Gabriel Mission,” by Guy Rose (1914)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image

I’ve been feeling prompted lately to start jotting down notes for my life story, and I think that I may even share some of them here. The notes below were written down swiftly, from memory, without any outline. My plan is to assemble such notes together and to use them as the germs of an eventual more formally constructed autobiography. (That sounds a bit more grand than I really have in mind!) But the first task is simply to get some thoughts and memories into the computer.

I was born in Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California.

My father was a native of North Dakota, a non-practicing Lutheran born to a Norwegian mother and to a Danish or Danish-American father. My grandmother came to the United States on her own in her late teens. There is ambiguity with regard to my grandfather because I, at least, am still not sure whether he was actually born in Schleswig-Holstein or immediately after his parents’ arrival in America or possibly even on the boat in the mid-Atlantic.

My father came to California during the Great Depression, following an older brother who had found work in the construction industry. My mother had come to California from St. George, Utah, as a teenager. She was an occasionally communicant, vaguely believing, but (I think) largely “cultural” Latter-day Saint at that time. She married another nominal Latter-day Saint, originally from Idaho, and had a son by him, my ten-years older half brother. But her first husband, Evan D. Walters, who worked as a conductor on the old Los Angeles electric streetcar system, died of a sudden heart attack in 1943, at the age of only thirty-eight; their baby was less than a year old. (Evan Walters died on the job, and my mother always suspected that he had, in fact, been accidentally electrocuted. But I can say nothing of that.)

By that time, my father had been serving for several years in the Army of the United States. He would close out the war in England, Germany, Austria, and France as a staff sergeant in the Eleventh Armored Division, a part of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. At the conclusion of the war, he returned home to North Dakota. But there was little for him there. While the other siblings had been otherwise engaged, the youngest brother — a kind man (as I recall him) with a weakness for alcohol (not altogether without precedent or parallel in the extended family) — had taken over the small family farm for his aging parents and had lost it. Eventually, the entire family (save one sister) left North Dakota for the now booming state of California. And my father returned to California, too.

In partnership with another of his brothers, my father launched a small construction contracting business in 1949, specialized in paving and grading, asphalt and concrete, in South El Monte. E. C. Construction Company — the name comes from Ernest (my uncle) and Carl (my Dad) — started off doing streets, residential driveways, and curb-and-gutter work but eventually came to specialize in larger roads, large commercial and public school parking lots, foundations for commercial buildings, and specialized factory slabs (including for Paramount Studios and other Hollywood filmmakers). The company’s work is located all over Southern California (and occasionally beyond); for many years, they were the go-to site-contractor for the scattered power stations of Southern California Edison. But, for obvious reasons, the company’s projects were concentrated most especially in the San Gabriel Valley, including the parking lot and racetrack area at Santa Anita Park and my own high school’s parking lot and its football field and track.

Two curious facts:

Ideally you shouldn’t notice it, but the underwater combat scenes in The Hunt for Red October [1990] were filmed in a special pool built for that purpose by E. C. Construction.
And, in one of the opening scenes of the financially unsuccessful but critically well-received (and, I think, quite moving) 2003 film House of Sand and Fog, Sir Ben Kingsley — who was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award in this role — is shown wearing one of our company uniforms and working with one of our company crews.)

I was able to visit my father in Whittier Presbyterian Hospital on the weekend just before he died. His hospitalization wasn’t thought to be for anything life-threatening, but my brother was going to be out of town and he suggested that I come down and spend time with Dad. I will always be grateful that I did, because it was my last opportunity to see him. I went home late on Sunday night, and my brother called the next day to say that Dad had died.

He wasn’t at all clear, mentally, during that visit. His memory was gone. This surprised me, and I never really resolved whether he had had a stroke or whether it was a side effect of medications. But I spent hours with him, and he kept asking me the same questions, over and over and over again. It was interesting to me to see what mattered to him at the end, under such reduced circumstances, when he was blind (from a totally unexpected stroke a few years before) and his life and awareness were limited essentially to a hospital room. He didn’t want to know whether he had earned a lot of money or lived in a big house. (We were, I think I can justly say, upper middle class.) “Did I live a good life?” he repeatedly asked me. “Did I do anything worthwhile?” “Did I serve in the Army?” “Did my children turn out alright?” It gave me enormous satisfaction to be able to answer him truthfully that, yes, he had led a good life. His children had turned out more or less okay. He had served in Europe during the Second World War, participating in the defeat of the Third Reich and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen. And he had contributed significantly to the development of various areas around Southern California. “So I led a good life?” he asked. “That’s good.” And then, about an hour or so later, he would ask me the same questions.

A nephew runs the company now, though its days may sadly be winding down. It will be the end of an era lasting more than three quarters of a century.

I say that my paternal grandparents and my paternal aunts and uncles (save one, although even she moved to the greater San Diego area when she was tragically widowed) ended up in Southern California. This was good, from my limited perspective, because I got to know most of them reasonably well. My maternal grandparents remained in Utah, as did most of my maternal aunts and uncles, though I came to know them perhaps even better. Unfortunately, both of my grandfathers died before I was born, and both of my grandmothers died when I was five years old, one of them while she was still residing off in southern Utah. I’ve always envied friends who were able to spend time with their grandparents. I never really did.

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