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PETER WILSON

Peter Wilson, the man who passed on from Fontana a few years back, was an attorney. He was much more than an attorney, however. He was a man with an enormous heart. He gathered in those who were wronged and were wrong at the same time. As a local Walworth attorney, there was nobody like him. He didn’t win cases so much as hearts and then gave back the ability for those hearts to keep on beating. The words on his mind and often quoted were: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Those words were not Peter’s until he took them.  They are words carved into the base of the Statue of Liberty, a colossal gift built by the French and sailed to New York’s Harbor to celebrate the beginning of a country where humanity would always come first. Peter Wilson, that Peter Wilson, died several years ago, but then something happened.  Another man appeared and took up the mantle. The new version of the old Peter Wilson is impressive and coincidentally named Peter Wilson himself. Instead of being an attorney, however, this man is the superintendent of the Lake Geneva School District.

Where the earlier Wilson was taking in lost souls who had little money and even less hope, this Peter Wilson is all about kids. Picture him huddling down with a group of kindergarteners and they are all having a wonderful time, but then he leaves to go and attempt to find support for those kids. Find the money, from whatever government funds he can track down to private individuals who have heart, as rare as they might be in Walworth County, to allow for the paying of school lunches and breakfasts. A thousand of those lunches a day and then five hundred or so breakfast meals. This man even worries about snow days, but not for the reasons you might ascribe such worry to.

No, he worries about the kids who have little or nothing and will not be getting breakfast and lunch on those days, so he sets up service for them at churches and other non-profits to make sure no kids go hungry on his watch. Peter Wison is as worried about the coming changes being threatened (so far) by the national leadership.  Those changes, if fully enacted, would cause Peter Wilson to close one of the elementary schools under his control in the district. The stress this causes to such a man is enormous. The childcare lost to the parents and the potential inability of the transferred students to make it to school, as the bus service might go the same way as the federal articles that have funded about twenty-five percent of the district’s expenses, particularly for the little kids who have disabilities physical and mental.

The existence of these two individuals and witnessing their efforts to help humanity for no real motivational reason other than they were born the way they are, and they are choosing to remain that way despite any adversity presented to them. Neither man was political, but both men have worked and continue to work with the results affecting their efforts every day and night. This Peter Wilson offered to meet with the citizenry and parents, and whomever, to discuss the referendum voted upon as well as the potential of the possibly coming federal withdrawal from local school support.  With the except of three others, other than GSR reporters and cameraman, nobody came. Being a man of the people, a man who takes in the strays and lost who will one day be the country’s leaders is not a thankful pursuit, and that this Peter Wilson, like the last one, perseveres into the adversity is more than admirable. It’s saintly.