In Memory

Peter J. Meyer

Peter J. Meyer

Peter J. Meyer died Jan.3, 2019.

Swarthmore Classmate Bob Mueller writes the following:

Peter Meyer was a child psychiatrist in the Philadelphia area and lived on the Main Line with his wife Susan Lelito. I maintained off-and-on contact with Peter — mainly off — over the decades and somehow wound up hiring his brother-in-law Bart Lelito to work in my construction company in the mid- to late-Seventies. My first wife Abigail had professional contact with Peter during her work as a pediatric  OT. Peter was very well regarded.

I met Peter for the first time at the University of Chicago in January 1964 when eight of us potentially-incoming Freshmen(4 men and 4 women) from Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan were interviewed by Swarthmore to compete for two special "Midwest Scholarships." 

Though we were cut from much different bolts of cloth, Peter and I became good friends in Chicago and at Swarthmore. (I would have failed freshman Political Science if Peter had not hounded me every day to provide MY term paper copy so that HE could type it up for ME!) 

Peter was known on campus for always walking around in a gray-tan trench coat and green book bag. In Hamburg Shows, he played himself in caricature. His eyeglass lenses were thick as Coke bottle bottoms, but when he talked to you he would lean back his head and crinkle his nose in a magnificent squint. Because there was also an upperclassman “Peter Meyer” on campus, our Class of ’68 freshman was dubbed “Peter Meyer the Younger,” like some medieval painter!

Peter was a University of Chicago faculty brat. His father Gerhard Meyer was an Economist and German Immigrant: 
“...Gerhard Meyer, a wonderful and distinguished teacher, an economist by training, a Christian socialist, and a lifelong friend of the theologian Paul Tillich. He was renowned among many generations of undergraduates for his teaching in the general education program. He was a gift to the University of Chicago, inadvertently generated by the rise to power of the Nazis. (University of Chicago Magazine).” 

As I recall, Peter’s diminutive mother was a psychiatrist Giant!

Gerhard was also the “beloved faculty adviser” to the U of Chicago Student Branch of CORE (Congress On Racial Equality) during the Sixties. That group included at different points in time both Bernie Sanders and my Milwaukee high school friend, Bruce Millies. When I went to visit Bruce in Chicago, I also had to visit the Meyers who readily adopted me as another “German son." 

I shared a room with Peter for our Junior Year and visited his family’s summer house in the woods of New Hampshire — on or near Lake Laconia. The parents ventured forth into the forest each day to hunt edible mushrooms. They matched what they harvested against huge, colorful mushroom charts that covered a kitchen wall, being careful not to poison us! 

Delicious dinners! In exchange, I baked them rhubarb pie. 

Peter was an immensely generous and sweet man — very much the product of these wonderful parents. Peter's obituary and other internet notes stand witness to the lives he improved and even saved. Peter was relentlessly, quietly stubborn in argument at Swarthmore, and he richly applied his determination and resolute conviction to his patients. 

Like his mother, a Little Giant of a Therapist; like his father, a Deep Believer in Humanity and a courageous fighter on its behalf.

I loved this guy and miss him. I also tried to track him down in 2018, but he was already quite ill.. 

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/mainlinemedianews/name/peter-meyer-obituary?id=9109792



 
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04/17/23 10:28 AM #1    

Michael S. Fields

Sorry to learn about Peter's passing.  We were roommates our sophmore year.  I am sorry we didn't really get to know each other better.  (I was going through my identity-crisis, alienated phase so I was often in a state).  But I remember Peter as gentle, considerate soul, with a great smile, and sense of humor who tolerated some of my bad behavior with patience.


04/17/23 12:45 PM #2    

Emily Albrink (Hartigan)

Just so sad. All this time, I had hoped to see him again, as we ran around together for about a year. He would take me to the "bodes" dining room and argue that the Catholic Church was the greatest destructive force in the history of the West, and I would try to point out what Hannah Arendt had been writing about totalitarianism as Hitler and Stalin were avowed atheists and ideology was the pervasive threat ----  we never stopped learning from one another. One of the richest ongoing dialogues I had at Swarthmore.

What a gentle, lovely soul. No wonder he was led to help children heal, as he had the best of a child's heart, a wonderful analytic process, and a deft sense of humor.

 


04/17/23 02:14 PM #3    

Eleanor Morse

Thank you, Bob Mueller for your wonderful tribute to Peter Meyer. I wish I'd known him better. I think of him during our Freshman year Hamburg show--wearing his signature trenchcoat, coming out on stage, standing a moment with a pair of cymbals, glasses glinting in the stage lights, then BANG! He turned around, and walked off. After a thunderous ovation he came back and did it again. Genius. 


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