Chicago engineer at the Pullman Company.

William Hartin Peterson was the first son of Hartin F. and Martha Johnson Peterson. Hartin was born in 1892 to Swedish parents who had immigrated to the United States and were employed at Pullman. Hartin served in the Navy during World War I and returned to become a draftsman at Pullman, working on the design of passenger car air-conditioning systems. In 1919, Hartin married fellow Pullman employee Martha Johnson, also a child of Swedish immigrants who worked for Pullman. Martha, born in 1895, was the third of Alfred and Elin Johnson’s seven surviving children. Martha was very devout and an active member in her church, while Hartin chose instead to affiliate with the Mason Brotherhood. Martha was a doting mother, as her wartime letters to William indicate.

Born in 1921, William showed an early interest in science, and after graduating high school he got a job at Pullman Car Works. In 1942, Peterson enlisted in the Navy where he served as a radar man on the U.S.S. Arkansas. The ship was deployed to the Atlantic and participated in the Normandy invasion and fighting off the coast of Cherbourg. After the war, Peterson married nurse Ingrid Nelson in 1946, with whom he had two daughters, and in 1947 completed an engineering degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Peterson returned to Pullman where he patented 60 designs during his career. In 1987 he received the Arnold Stucki Award for mechanical engineering in the field of railroad transportation. He died in Chicago in 2008.

Through the marriage of William's daughter Karla Hanley, the histories of her parents-in-law Robert Hanley and Genevieve Kotula Hanley are included in this collection. Robert, born in 1923, received the name Hanley from his Irish grandfather, and the rest of his family was of Polish descent. Robert was the oldest child of Walter Hanley and Helen Cybulski, both of whom grew up in poverty in the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. The Hanley family was hard-hit by the Depression, so Robert worked odd jobs while attending school and joined the Navy in 1942 as an electrician. His LST ship participated in the landings at Peleliu and Okinawa. Back home, Robert married Genevieve ("Gene") Kotula in 1946. Born in 1923 as the eighth of eleven children, Gene was also raised in a working-class Polish family in Bridgeport, where her father was employed by ACME Steel. Both Robert and Gene provide vivid details of their experiences in Bridgeport and during the war. Robert and Gene's son Scott married Karla Peterson in 1980.