June 4 will mark a homecoming of sorts for Sharon Peters.
The 1967 Bangor High School graduate will be speaking about her book “Trusting Calvin: How a Dog Helped Heal a Holocaust Survivor’s Heart” from 6 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 4, at the Bangor Public Library.
She’ll also be making another appearance Friday, June 6, in Freeport, where she’s doing a talk and book signing as a luncheon fundraiser for the South Freeport Congregational Church.
While in town, Peters will visit her aunt and uncle Pat and Ervin Hill, who live on Broadway next door to the house in which she grew up.
Peters, who now lives in Colorado, was born in Washington, D.C., but moved to Bangor at age 4. A reader from a young age, the library played quite a role in her formative years.
“Books were always my comfort, my escape and the spur to my imagination,” she recalled. “I got my first library card at the Bangor Public Library when I was 8 or 9, and I would get armloads of books every couple of weeks. … I didn’t much care what the topic was … I could always learn something about new things I hadn’t experienced and the world beyond Bangor, Maine.”
Peters attended ninth grade at the old high school, which had split sessions due to overcrowding. She would visit the library next door for a couple of hours before classes started after noon.
“I remember walking up those broad steps, entering the quiet that was like no other quiet, sniffing in the rich scent of books and knowledge, and I would always smile,” Peters said. “It felt like home, but better. It was a place where almost anything was possible.”
This love of words translated into a career path for Peters, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1972. She went on to enjoy a decades-long career in newspapers as a writer, editor and consultant.
Another ever-present part of Peters’ life has been animals. She grew up with horses, ponies and dogs, and her grandmother was the town of Benton’s animal saver, so there were often stray raccoons, birds, dogs and cats there when she visited during the summer.
She got her first dog as an adult during her last semester at Missouri, and purebred Irish setter
Shaughnessy was with her for almost 16 years. Wherever she went, stray dogs would end up with her for a time. Her second dog, Buck, came from the pound, but she bought him at an off-site event. She admitted to having a fear of animal shelters that persisted for years.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 changed everything for Peters. She took a one-month unpaid leave from her job at the Colorado Springs Gazette and went to Mississippi, where she had previously worked, to volunteer. She spent days at the Humane Society of South Mississippi and evenings hanging and mudding drywall for people whose homes had been ruined by the storm.
“The shelter work was heart-breaking,” she said. “But once I had lived through it, my aversion for
shelters was gone and I had a much deeper understanding of how desperate the homeless pet situation in the United States is.”
She carried four dogs back in her Toyota Highlander to new homes in Colorado. She quit her job
three months later, and returned to volunteer in Mississippi two more times. She convinced a former employer, USA Today, to let her write a few pet stories, which led to a weekly column, Pet Talk.
Peters also became a volunteer dog walker at a little, high-in-the-mountains shelter about 40 miles away, and serves as a foster home for three different rescue groups. She’s had about 20 foster dogs stay for a time, then go on to new homes.
“It’s hard to see the suffering some of these animals have had to put up with, and it’s definitely hard to say good-bye to them, but it takes no special skill to be a foster,” she said. “I have the room and the time, and I regard myself as a stopping-off point for animals who need a launch pad.”
Peters met Holocaust survivor Max Edelman through her column. Edelman survived nearly five years in labor and death camps during the Holocaust. He was beaten blind by camp guards in the final months before his liberation, moved to Cleveland after the war, worked for decades in the Cleveland Clinic darkroom and raised two successful sons. When he was nearly 70, he decided he needed, for the first time, a guide dog. Their relationship was troubled until Edelman was finally, at the dog’s insistence, able to release his hold on some of the self-protective barriers he had erected during his years in the camps.
When a literary agent who had been following Peters’ columns got in touch with her about writing a book, there was only one story that she wanted to tell: Max’s.
“The agent agreed to that and found a publishing house, Max agreed to cooperate and spent hundreds of hours talking with me, and the book was born,” she explained.
“Trusting Calvin” was recently released in Portuguese by a Brazilian publisher, and has been chosen as a summer selection by the prestigious literary catalog Bas Bleu.
Peters no longer writes her Pet Talk column. Instead she writes a nationally syndicated car-care column for about 100 newspapers and occasional book reviews for USA Today while working as an editor for Mathematica Policy Research, a social-policy research firm in Washington, D.C.
But she remains an animal advocate, which she doesn’t find all that different from being a journalist.
“The history of journalism — the best part of it — is steeped in giving voice to people who have none,” Peters said. “It’s a fundamental precept that you kind of have to buy into if you’re going to have any success at all. Furthermore, I think it is right and just that all of us be judged by how we treat the least powerful among us. It isn’t much of a stretch to apply that to animals as well as people. But I’m a soft-spoken advocate, not a ham-fisted one. I think sometimes sentiment can be swayed by simply telling the stories of the amazing sensitivity, intuitiveness and generosity of spirit that animals possess.”