PRIMETIME of your life FREE | VOLUME 4 • ISSUE NO. 10 | OCTOBER 2015 Interesting features for our 50+ audience
Steve Petersen A Man for all Seasons By Lucinda Sue Crosby For PrimeTime of Your Life
R
obert Frost once wrote: “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” The Vermont Poet Laureate understood the basic simplicity, depth, honesty and practical nature of the art of words … and he might well have been describing the life of long term Coachella Valley resident and sometime Renaissance Man Steve Petersen.
Born in Lynwood, California to a teenaged mother, Steve remembers music as the first of the artistic disciplines that helped bring his life into focus. Singing and strumming on his collection of guitars, Steve has, at various times of his life, wandered down familiar and unfamiliar roads like a modern day troubadour, delighting audiences with mellow voice tones coupled with music that can only be described as pure Americana.
But we digress! At one point, Steve admits he drifted into truancy. “I never got into alcohol or drugs,” he said, “but I was having a hard time engaging in my own future.” Thankfully, a truant officer who was a friend of Steve’s mother, Barbara, intervened by personally overseeing the boy’s eye-popping visit to the Southgate Juvenile Detention Center. “Best thing that ever happened to me – I realized I wanted to go back to school and do well.” Where, as it happened, a gifted English teacher who recognized Steve’s facility with putting words together in a meaningful way urged him to try his hand at poetry. The boy’s first serious effort, a controversial antiVietnam War piece, was published to acclaim accompanied by calls to the school principal that the work was “un-American.” Having attended Cerritos Community College and Pierce College, Steve graduated from Cal State Northridge on the back of a football scholarship. And though his artistic nature beckoned, the budding man pragmatically pursued a career in construction. It came naturally – his Great Uncle, Samuel Horace Anderson, designed and built LA’s fabled Red Car Transportation System. Happily, Steve’s creative light was not dimmed because, around this same time frame, he auditioned for and won membership in the Poetry Society of America. Shortly thereaf-
Steve Petersen
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