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Remembering the Editor
If you’ve ever read one of my late husband Max’s editorials on Ctoldhouse.com, you already know how vividly he could bring a memory to life. For decades, Max shared Connecticut’s stories (and many of his own) with warmth, humor, and a knack for detail that made readers feel as though they were walking right beside him as he thoughtfully unearthed treasures from the past.
Max was born in New York City, but his heart belonged to New England, beginning with a formative childhood trip to Vermont through the Fresh Air Fund, a program that brought inner-city children into nature.
As a first grader, a teacher noticed Max’s unusual intelligence and asked his mother for permission to have his IQ tested. When the results came back, the teacher exclaimed, “Your son is a genius!” His mother, who had already watched him lose himself in books and records since preschool, was hardly surprised. She bought him a bird guide that day, and from then on Max became a lifelong birdwatcher, starting with the pigeons on the city sidewalks.
When he was ten, his family moved to an old house in Fairfield, Connecticut, the first house he’d ever lived in. Later, he wrote about that move in Ctoldhouse.com:
| “No matter how skillful I become with words, I will never be able to express my feelings the day my dad moved us up to Tunxis Hill in Fairfield, Connecticut, in the middle of April 1959… In one day, my brothers and I went from a public housing project where we weren’t allowed to walk on the grass to an old house that was surrounded by hundreds of acres of unfenced woods, swamps and open fields… If I told you that in every season—pollywog season, camp season, salamander season and ice-skating season—we had an absolute blast, you still would have only a faint idea of the fun we had in our little wilderness.” | ||
At McKinley School and later Norwalk High School, Max encountered teachers who recognized his bright spirit and inquisitive mind, and he never forgot them. He wrote of Alfred L. Bowes, his principal, and of three English teachers—Isabel Colby and Frances and Mr. Ramer—who shaped his understanding of empathy and language. “In Connecticut,” he wrote, “the light of brotherhood seems to shine through, somehow.”
Even after leaving Connecticut as a young adult, the state remained in his imagination forever. He loved what he called “the great Connecticut Yankee trading tradition” and mourned “the rural feel that was dying quietly when I showed up.” His longing for that way of life inspired his lifelong study of New England’s history, architecture, and craftsmanship. Ctoldhouse.com became his way of honoring those roots.
As an experienced outdoorsman, Max approached the natural world with reverence and an unfettered joy. He slept under the stars, knew how to call owls, could start a fire in the rain, and impressed us by telling the exact time by the sun’s position in the sky.
When we met in the fall of 1972 (and married very soon thereafter), he began bringing me leaves as gifts, collected from his frequent nature walks. Over the decades he continued; a leaf would be tucked into my hand or pressed into the pages of a book I was reading. Leaves were tokens of love, no less meaningful for being free, and reminders of the whirlwind autumn when our life together began.
Max’s intellectual curiosity extended everywhere: music, art, literature, philosophy, ecology, social justice, Indigenous rights, and especially the beauty of old things.
Reading and writing were at the center of his life. As a teenager, he might forget his jacket on the bus but never his book. He carried a book everywhere his entire life, along with a notebook and always a blue-ink pen. He feared running out of time before he could capture everything he wanted to say. His early writing was full of long, tumbling sentences that reflected his restless mind.
As Max’s lifelong copy editor, most of the arguments in our fifty-one-year marriage were about commas! I tried to show him that his words could be even more powerful when held by grammar. It took years, but once he adjusted his style, his voice found its stride, and he began to publish more widely.
Max wrote poetry, short stories, novellas, and essays, but he loved journalism best. He savored the immediacy of sharing an idea with the world. He wrote as an outdoor columnist for the Stockton Record and contributed to the Los Angeles Times and a variety of other publications. He self-published a collection of poetry and stories, as well as booklets on the philosophers Sartre, Camus, and Kierkegaard.
Through Ctoldhouse.com, Max brought all of his passions together: history, nature, craftsmanship, and storytelling. He believed that stories had the power to keep places alive, and he deeply loved connecting with the people who shared his enthusiasm for Connecticut’s vibrant past.
Above all, he was a seeker of truth, beauty, and knowledge. I still find leaves tucked inside our books, reminders of how he saw the world as fragile, luminous, and worth saving.
Max died on January 12, 2025, after a long illness. Even from his hospital bed, he worked on the next issue of Ctoldhouse.com and nearly finished reading a five-hundred-page biography of his hero, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose legacy, conviction, and moral clarity he so deeply admired.
He is survived by me, our four children, four grandchildren, his beloved little dog Ralphie (named after Ralph Waldo Emerson), and a brother who still lives in Connecticut.
To all who have read, written, advertised, or shared in Ctoldhouse.com through the years, thank you for being part of Max’s world. Your support, friendship, and curiosity meant more to him than you will ever know.
—Ruth Peters
Header photo by Skip Broom, HP Broom Housewright, Inc.