Patsy June Peterson

She was startlingly athletic and generous. She was nice beyond any reasonable expectation of niceness. She made the most gooey-tender, warm-from-the-oven caramel rolls on Palmer Lake. She was exceptionally well traveled. Abhorring the cold, she spent half the year on Florida’s golf courses and bike paths. She once said, “I don’t have a television, I have a fireplace” – and both observations revealed something.

Patsy June (Payton) Peterson, whose role as pastor’s wife led her to spend her 94 years in almost every corner of Minnesota, died on New Year’s Eve in the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Lisa and Mark Vandelist, in Lakeville.

Her mother’s own dreams of a college degree and a career in teaching had been stunted by family tragedy. She achieved both. She obtained a long-sought master’s degree at the age of 47, leading to a switch from teacher to counselor.

Daughter of parents who made it to every state but Rhode Island, she traveled with infectious energy, stalking toucans in Costa Rica and packing multiple world-class plays into a single day, day after day, in London. Every grandchild got a dream trip with grandma, strolling the Seine in Paris or biking Italian hills.

Born in 1931 to Lawrence and Eulalie Payton, she lived with them and sister Audrey in idyllic beauty along Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis. Interviewed for a school project by one of her grandchildren, Eulalie recalled that her youngest was such a sparkler that a family friend once asked, “If something happens to you, can we have Patsy?”

She graduated from Washburn High School in 1949 and from the University of Minnesota with a degree in home economics in 1953. She married Calvin Peterson, a Methodist minister, in 1952, and they served Minnesota churches in Nashwauk, Eveleth, Windom throughout the Sixties, then Columbia Heights briefly and finally Moorhead for nearly two decades.

Her own career in education began in the Windom schools and continued in the school districts of St. Anthony Park and Moorhead. Assigned for a time to a school for expectant moms, and – coincidentally, an expert in childbirth -- she offered to support girls in delivery rooms when families spurned daughters.

She excelled at everything she did. She didn’t just sew; she made draperies and her husband’s suits. She made dainty, heirloom dresses for little girls. The start-stop whirring of her Singer sewing machine on the dining room table was the soundtrack of her children’s early lives. She didn’t just knit; she crafted fisherman’s sweaters and soft, tiny wool garments for babies.

In retirement she created a lake home in northern Minnesota, vivid with flowered window boxes and birds, designed with Scandinavian spareness and light. She biked several times in Europe with a merry band of chums from Hubbard United Methodist. Proud to be fit and youthful, she would bike her age in miles each year well into her seventies.

Cancer stole both her husbands. Calvin died in 1993, after 41 years of marriage. Bret DeGeer, whom she married in 2003, and with whom she traveled extensively and biked for thousands of miles, died 20 years later.

She is survived by her children Dave (Sue), Edina; Glenn (Liz), Asheville, NC; Lisa (Mark), Lakeville, and Kim (Jackson Brosh), Foley; by grandchildren Nora (Shawn), Nate (Grace), Kit, Libby, Jake (Meredith), Sarah (Thomas), and Ben (Shahla); and by great grandchildren Sully, Hadley, Harper, Hudson, Kaia, Margot, Lucy and Calvin.

A memorial service is this summer at Northern Pines, near Park Rapids, a church camp holding a lifetime of memories. The family requests donations to the Northern Pines Camp & Retreat Center.