Cecilie B. Peterson

Biography

A girl named Cecilie B. Peterson crossed the Atlantic in 1899, eight years after her Norwegian birth, stepping off the boat in Brooklyn with her parents and two sisters and into the clamor of New York. Silent-era Hollywood later borrowed her pen for a handful of pictures, but the reel life gave way to real life when she wed Harold C. Brown and became mother to three rambunctious boys. Widowed while the children were still small, she steered the family through the gloom of the Great Depression outside Concord, New Hampshire, stretching every dollar like elastic. When the boys were grown, she put down roots in Sparta, New Jersey, staying until retirement beckoned. Two sons eventually traded uniforms for civilian clothes in Seattle; at eighty, she followed them west, trading Jersey pines for Evergreen skies and spending two tidy decades in a Bellevue apartment before closing the book at ninety-seven in 1989.