Finding Kathy

By Mitch Allen

Three weeks before Kathy Peterson died, I told her that I wanted to write a book about her life. I asked her if we could sit down together with a tape recorder and discuss the juicy details. She responded that her life just really wasn’t that interesting.

She was wrong.

Kathy left us on Saturday morning, April 13, 2013. As anyone who knew her might expect, she was getting dressed for a party when her great heart simply stopped. It seems that Kathy was constantly preparing for a party, on her way to a party, enjoying a party—or cleaning up after one.

Kathy was the hardest working person I ever met. As Mimi Vanderhaven’s original personal assistant, she sold our first ad and was our top advertising representative for 10 years in a row. In fact, she died two days before press time with another record month, which she managed to do at the age of 70.

There, I said it. She was 70.

To Kathy, her age was top secret. As her employer, I didn’t even know it until it was revealed to me at the funeral home. For years I personally avoided any HR task that would give me knowledge of her age, and I mention it now only to put into perspective what I am about to tell you next.

Finding Herself
Kathy was a child of the early 60s, a wild child who came of age at a time when America was about to shed its Puritan cloak. In college, without her parent’s knowledge, she traveled from Northeast Ohio to Daytona Beach, Florida for spring break. Unfortunately for Kathy, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite decided to do a report about spring break revelers. Kathy’s parents, sitting in their Cleveland living room, watched in horror as their daughter attempted to climb a flagpole on the beach—on national television.

But the brief, black and white broadcast should have come as no surprise to Kathy’s father, Bud Hallock, who had always told his daughter that she should do the things she wants to do because “You’re going to feel real stupid dying of nothing.”

Kathy became immersed in 1960s culture and dedicated herself to becoming a writer. She wrote ad copy for May Company before landing a writing gig with Reuben Sturman, the outlandish adult magazine publisher and free-speech advocate. In that job, Kathy interviewed legendary porn stars like John Holmes. Later, the Feds had difficulty nailing Sturman on porn charges, but they eventually got him in 1989 on tax evasion. He died in federal prison in 1997, but not before Kathy visited him in jail for a final interview.

In the early 1970s, Kathy settled down and married her long-time best friend Ray Peterson, an executive with American Greetings. But it turned out they were better friends than spouses, and the divorce broke Kathy’s heart. Rebounding, she frizzed her hair into a giant Afro and left for Europe...to find herself.

Across the Atlantic, Kathy spent a lot of time biking the English countryside—500 miles in all—before meeting up with a group of like souls who convinced her that if she really wanted to find herself, it wouldn’t be in England, it would be in India.

Kathy took their advice and traveled to the Asian continent where she literally went to the mountaintop. She met and served with various gurus and found herself praying more and more. Her health suffered but her spirit soared. She lost weight and her skin became covered in boils. She could feel her egocentric youth fading away, replaced by a sense that her life’s true purpose was about to be revealed. That’s when she arrived in Puducherry, a coastal town in southern India, where everything changed.

“What took you so long?”
Three-year-old John Bosco was an orphan. The dark-skinned, bright-eyed little boy first lost his father to an infection, then his mother to illness or complications of childbirth, no one seems to know for sure. A kind, German family had taken in John Bosco, teaching him English and introducing him to the Catholic faith, but the family’s guardianship was minimal and, for the most part, his playground was the streets of Puducherry.

When Kathy first saw tiny John Bosco, she felt the center of the universe shift. Looking into his soft, brown eyes, she not only fell instantly in love with him, she finally found herself. As the toddler returned her gaze, he said in perfect English, “What took you so long?”

Coincidentally, the German couple was looking to return home, but that fact would not have mattered to Kathy anyway. Bosco was now hers. She spent the next 12 months slashing through a jungle of red tape to get John Bosco on a plane to the United States. Back in Cleveland, the red tape continued as Kathy began adoption proceedings. On one visit to a government official, Kathy was told that various agencies in India would need to get involved before John Bosco could come to the U.S.

Kathy replied, “You don’t understand. He’s in the lobby.”

The adoption complete, Kathy became the ultimate doting mother. In addition to her full-time positions, including a long stint with Cleveland’s Mutual Display Company, she held many other odd jobs to help pay for John Bosco’s education. She worked a stall at West Side Market called Judy’s Oasis, and she slung hash at Cleveland’s historic Ruthie and Moe’s Diner where the clientele loved her. She was a fabulous cook and took various catering jobs to help pay the bills.

Kathy converted to Catholicism and was baptized on behalf of her son, and sent him to the finest Catholic schools. John Bosco graduated from St. Ignatius High School, earned a psychology degree from Case Western Reserve University, then a BSN from Cleveland State University—ranking number two in his class. Today he is the charge nurse at a clinic for MetroHealth System, where, like his mother did, he dedicates himself to the service of others.

More Than Friends
Kathy’s friends say that if she wanted you to be her friend, then you became one. But her energy, charm, brutal honesty, and endless capacity for compassion and empathy made her much more than a friend; she became your sister or your mother, and she would sooner die than let you down.

The day she met my wife, Kathy told her: “I am going to be the kind of friend who will tell you when it’s time.”

“Time for what?” my wife asked.

“You know, a facelift.”

Kathy threw lavish dinner parties for her friends with help from John Bosco, who would set the table with such an array of beautiful china and crystal that there would barely be room for the guests. She was a natural host and a gourmet chef. If you invited Kathy to your party, she would arrive not with a store-bought cheese ball like everyone else, but with homemade goose liver pâté, and she would stay late to help you clean up.

Her goal in later life was simple: She wanted the friends and family members whom she loved so dearly—particularly her cherished nieces and nephews—to feel special. And if you were one of those people, you were blessed indeed.

When Kathy’s ex-husband Ray became terminally ill, she became his caregiver. She visited her mother every single day up until the day her mother died. After John Bosco moved out, he and Kathy rarely missed a Sunday brunch together, and when a friend’s Jersey Shore home was damaged during Hurricane Sandy, Kathy drove all night to help her move.

Once when I was complaining about having to write a speech, she told me of the time she went backstage to inform a famous guru that it was time for him to go on. Three minutes remained before he was to speak to a soccer stadium filled with 100,000 people.

“What are you going to speak about?” she asked him.

“I don’t know yet,” he answered.

Kathy was smart, witty, beautiful, charming, and highly energetic. She was so far left politically that she made most democrats appear conservative. She was a fierce proponent of women’s rights and had an intuitive grasp of institutionalized racism.

In her later years as a writer for Mimi Vanderhaven, she fell in love with the community of Strongsville. She attended a different fundraiser in Cleveland’s southwest suburbs almost every night, taking photos of the guests and acknowledging their attendance in her popular Velvet Cushion society column. She joined the Strongsville Rotary and made it to each Friday meeting at 7:15 a.m. while the rest of us slept. Her work ethic was so strong that if anything didn’t go her way, she blamed herself for not trying hard enough. Kathy, I kept saying, it’s not your fault.

She told her friends that when her time came to leave this world, she wanted to go quickly, preferably slumping over her desk at work. And that’s almost the way it happened. She was getting dressed for the party of a co-worker’s husband to celebrate his becoming a fireman, and we sensed that something was wrong when she didn’t show up.

She never let anybody down.