About Peter
I’ve been a writer as long as I can remember, and a journalist for most of my life.
I started writing newspaper articles when I was nine. The stories were frauds. I made them up and published them in my own newspaper, writing each copy by hand and selling them to my neighbors for a nickel. I lived in Syosset, a suburban town on Long Island, but I called my paper “The Mississippi River Mud” because I was reading Mark Twain and I thought I was Tom Sawyer. I was a goofy kid.
My father climbed poles for the Long Island Lighting Company and after work he’d sprawl across the couch with a newspaper, gleefully reading his favorite comic strips to me and my three sisters. My mother taught high school history and she used to recite poetry from memory and read to me from Dr. Seuss books and those encyclopedias you bought at the supermarket for 99 cents apiece back in the early '60s. So I learned to love the sound of written words read aloud---a valuable lesson for a writer.
I wrote for my middle school newspaper and my high school newspaper, and then studied journalism at Boston University, where I worked on The News, a radical weekly that got kicked off campus for being too outrageous. Our editorial policy was simple: unwavering support for the immediate and total liberation of absolutely everybody everywhere. (Hey, it was the early ‘70s.)
After a post-graduate period of wandering around the western hemisphere, searching for adventure—and sometimes finding it—I worked at the Boston Herald American, People magazine and The Washington Post. I loved the reporter’s life—leaving the office and going someplace to meet interesting people and watch them in action, then coming back and turning the experience into a story. I worked at the Post for 22 glorious years, writing feature stories about cops and murderers and crooked pols and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the United States Senate and striking coal miners and Jerry Falwell, and wounded soldiers and a Virginia militia group and the 2004 Olympics and the guy who created Foamhenge, a life-size replica of Stonehenge carved out of Styrofoam, and…well, you get the idea. For 11 years, I also wrote a fortnightly column about magazines. All in all, it was the best grad school of American Studies imaginable, and they paid me to work there.
In 2008, I took an early retirement buyout, pretending my pension was a pseudo-Guggenheim grant to do interesting and creative work. Since then, I’ve produced two books of history--K Blows Top and Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy—and a regular column in American History magazine. I plan to do more in the future.
Meanwhile, I live in Rockville, Maryland with my wife, Kathy Oehl, an ICU nurse. We have two beautiful daughters, Caitlin and Emily, and a handsome dog named Albert, and life is good.
I started writing newspaper articles when I was nine. The stories were frauds. I made them up and published them in my own newspaper, writing each copy by hand and selling them to my neighbors for a nickel. I lived in Syosset, a suburban town on Long Island, but I called my paper “The Mississippi River Mud” because I was reading Mark Twain and I thought I was Tom Sawyer. I was a goofy kid.
My father climbed poles for the Long Island Lighting Company and after work he’d sprawl across the couch with a newspaper, gleefully reading his favorite comic strips to me and my three sisters. My mother taught high school history and she used to recite poetry from memory and read to me from Dr. Seuss books and those encyclopedias you bought at the supermarket for 99 cents apiece back in the early '60s. So I learned to love the sound of written words read aloud---a valuable lesson for a writer.
I wrote for my middle school newspaper and my high school newspaper, and then studied journalism at Boston University, where I worked on The News, a radical weekly that got kicked off campus for being too outrageous. Our editorial policy was simple: unwavering support for the immediate and total liberation of absolutely everybody everywhere. (Hey, it was the early ‘70s.)
After a post-graduate period of wandering around the western hemisphere, searching for adventure—and sometimes finding it—I worked at the Boston Herald American, People magazine and The Washington Post. I loved the reporter’s life—leaving the office and going someplace to meet interesting people and watch them in action, then coming back and turning the experience into a story. I worked at the Post for 22 glorious years, writing feature stories about cops and murderers and crooked pols and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the United States Senate and striking coal miners and Jerry Falwell, and wounded soldiers and a Virginia militia group and the 2004 Olympics and the guy who created Foamhenge, a life-size replica of Stonehenge carved out of Styrofoam, and…well, you get the idea. For 11 years, I also wrote a fortnightly column about magazines. All in all, it was the best grad school of American Studies imaginable, and they paid me to work there.
In 2008, I took an early retirement buyout, pretending my pension was a pseudo-Guggenheim grant to do interesting and creative work. Since then, I’ve produced two books of history--K Blows Top and Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy—and a regular column in American History magazine. I plan to do more in the future.
Meanwhile, I live in Rockville, Maryland with my wife, Kathy Oehl, an ICU nurse. We have two beautiful daughters, Caitlin and Emily, and a handsome dog named Albert, and life is good.