Lake Mills author Margot Peters dies just as her last book is published | Entertainment

JOHNSON CREEK — This was not how it was supposed to end for Margot Peters.

The Lake Mills author hadn’t much contemplated death for most her 89 years. Then last August, her husband, Peter Jordan, died of prostate cancer at the age of 79.

Peters began envisioning her later years getting around her home with a cane, having an occasional meal delivered, playing her piano and tooling around the Jefferson County countryside in her newly acquired convertible.

Her breast cancer had other ideas.

“I didn’t think it would happen so fast,” Peters said earlier this month in between alternating sips of water and eating ice chips. “I pictured myself going on until 98, staggering around the house. This was just very sudden and very painful. I just hope this doesn’t go on very long. I don’t think it will.”

Words have defined her career with books, poems and a 22 years in the English department at UW-Whitewater. And those words, spoken on June 9, were prophetic.

Peters died Saturday in Room 115 in the tranquil surroundings of the Rainbow Hospice Care facility that opened here in 2011 along Highway 26. The UW-Madison alum’s career included meticulous research that led to biographies of the Barrymores and a thespian power couple of international regard, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who lived in an estate in the Waukesha County hamlet of Genesee Depot. There have been books about playwright George Bernard Shaw, the English stage actress known as Mrs. Patrick Campbell and poet and author May Sarton.

“My mom slipped away today,” her daughter Claire Peters wrote Saturday in a short email. “No pain, and she went the way she wanted to go.”

When I visited with Margot Peters on June 9 at her request, she was armed with a pile of books to pass the time in between a steady stream of visitors and her straight-talking but humorous attitude.

When I arrived, her longtime friends and fellow members of the Arts Alliance of Greater Lake Mills, Steve Bower and Leslie DeMuth, a landscape painter, were on hand, along with Peters’ son, Marc.

Peters’ readings, piled on her bed within reach of her left hand, included “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles, and two books by Barbara Pym, “Jane and Prudence” and “An Unsuitable Attachment.” The thickest book was a collection of nonfiction that included the life stories of former Secretary of State Colin Powell; the Russian Imperial Romanov family eliminated by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918; and the true tale by Gareth Patterson of three orphaned lion cubs.

Her bed was below a large photo of a black-eyed Susan, but the room was peppered with real bouquets, too, some purchased, others clearly picked by hand from a garden. A large bag of Dum Dums suckers was there for visitors.

“I think it’s the most wonderful thing that has been invented. These are wonderful places,” Margot Peters said of the accommodations. “The staff has a great sense of humor. They’re always joking with me.”

Peters was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, shortly after she began writing “Murder Among Friends,” the story of a high school reunion in northern Wisconsin at which someone from the class of 1970 is murdered at their 30th class reunion. Peters finished the 146-page book last fall and because she no longer has an agent, self-published the novel through Amazon. It’s also available at Day Dream Believer Books & Gifts in downtown Lake Mills.

Known for her nonfiction, Peters penned her first book of fiction, “Wild Justice,” in 1995, which features a heroine who kills a man based on Peters’ father, who in real life abandoned his family when Peters was 3. She also wrote “Murder in Ice,” published in 2019, a mystery based in a small lake town in southeastern Wisconsin that resembles Lake Mills, before crafting what would become her final book.

“Murder Among Friends” is set at a high school reunion at a posh house on Crawling Rock Lake, a fictitious body of water in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. The idea for the book came from Ronald Hoffman, a longtime friend and former 1951 Wausau High School classmate, who proposed the book when they gathered in October 2019 for a class reunion near Minocqua. That led to email and phone conversations in an effort to define the plot, characters and hammer out who should kill whom and why.

“It was fun. She would send me a bunch of stuff and I would send her stuff back,” said Hoffman, 89, a retired Appleton pharmacist who lives in Combined Locks. “We’ve been friends for a long time and we knew each other before we really knew who we were. It’s been a blessing being able to do (the book) with her.”

Hoffman wasn’t aware of Peters’ writing career until the late 1990s or early 2000s. They first met in the third grade in Wausau, served on Safety Patrol together in sixth grade and reconnected their senior year after Peters had returned to Wausau after spending her early high school years at an all-girls school in Milwaukee. After graduating high school, she spent two years at the local extension college then headed to UW-Madison, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Peters spent three years at Northland College in Ashland and returned to Madison to earn her doctorate in Victorian literature while raising two children. But the bulk of her teaching career was in the English department at UW-Whitewater from 1969 to 1991, where she taught women’s studies and had a prolific writing career. She moved into her 1888 home in Lake Mills in 1973.

“She’s very independent. Very meticulous,” Hoffman said. “She took control of her life. I’ll remember her as a very good friend.”

When I wrote a profile on Peters in late 2020, she had talked openly about her cancer and was hoping to see her newest book of fiction come to publication and see her granddaughter graduate from high school. She lived to see both. And while she was unable to attend the ceremony, Peters was able to glow this month in the pride of her granddaughter, Violet Cradock, who graduated from Madison West High School last weekend and will attend UW-Eau Claire in the fall.

“She was my love,” Peters said. “She’s always debated politics with her father. She’s very interested in issues, law … I think she’ll do well.”

But dying is exhausting and Peters wished she “had the energy to deal with it all.”

Last week, Peters was relieved to learn her 11-year-old cat, Plumchin, had found a new home with a family in Lake Mills, but not before the Persian was brought to Peters’ room for a visit, although it spent most of the time trying to hide in a corner, Claire Peters said Tuesday. Marc Peters, who lives in Sun Prairie, was also able to bring in Scout, a dog that Margo and her husband had to give up because it became too much to care for.

“She got to know the new owners and was able to take Scout to the dog park once a week or so, one of the great joys of her past two years,” said Claire Peters, who lives in Madison and served as the book’s copy editor. “Scout was a little less freaked out than the cat during the visit.”

But Margot Peters’ fling as part-owner of a 1991 black Mercedes Benz convertible was about as brief as they come.

She and a longtime friend, Beverley Zulty, spotted the car for sale near the winery in downtown Lake Mills. On May 31, they took the car for a test drive and then each chipped in $3,000 to buy the vehicle, which has wipers on its front headlights. That night, while at home and the car parked in her driveway, Peters experienced extreme pain and called an ambulance to be taken to Meriter Hospital in Madison. She entered the hospice facility in Johnson Creek two days later having driven the car less than 10 miles.

“We were equally enamored with this car, especially for $3,000 each,” Peters said. “Oh, I wish I could see it again.”