From Australia to Mt. Airy, with love (and ‘potential’)

by PAM ROGOW

Sitting in her Mt. Airy aerie of a home, Peg Thatcher readily answers an initial question. “I’m 57. If I looked like an old hag, I’d care about telling you that. But I’m fine with it,” she says, laughing. She will be heading off to a yoga class in an hour.

And then her remarkable story starts unfolding — an astonishing tale of an Australian girl who from her earliest years was determined to find her own way.

Peg has led a remarkable, productive life. Growing up on the outskirts of Sydney, she raised three children in Australia and Fiji. She was a successful entrepreneur, an early organizer of Landmark Forum (an educational/management program that now offers courses

and workshops on five continents and 140 cities, including Philadelphia; www.landmarkforum.com) and a legendary fundraiser for the New York-based international Hunger Project. This year, she moved to Philadelphia to be the fundraiser for a nonprofit that supports projects in 17 African countries, OICI.

Peg will lead a workshop in Human Potential 101, upstairs at the Moving Arts Studio of Mt. Airy (MAMA) starting Monday, September 20.

Her language is clear, and her story is riveting, so I’ll leave most of the telling to her: “My family never even once sat around a table for a meal, just ourselves. My parents owned a beautiful old rambling house with 18 bedrooms, where they ran a kind of exclusive boarding house. We call it a ‘guest house’ in Australia. It was ‘recommended’ by the government.

“There was a graciousness to the building which my mother named ‘Merry Linger’ — stay a long time — and indeed many of the guests did. There were 30 guests, about half of them permanent. Some lived here forever, until they died. T his was their home, and my parents were their family. Others came for a month or a season. We never had over-nighters.

“This was in the early ‘50s, so de-mobilized armed service guys would come back from the war and tell stories. . . By the time I was six, I realized there was much more to each person than what you saw at first. As I got a little older, I started to seek out people and find out their histories and what they’d done. They were flooding out of Europe.

“We only had men until I was quite grown up. My mother said, ‘Once you get men and women in the same house, you start having problems in the house …’ Some of the men were Australian soldiers, home from prisoner-of-war camps.

“Most were men from Europe who made their home with us while they were looking for a job and beginning to make money. They’d get settled and then bring over their families. Hungarians, Yugoslavians, Germans. I didn’t know the word ‘Jews,’ but probably all the Europeans were Jews. They were ‘escapees’ in my mind, but I was young, and even when they came with numbers on their wrists, I didn’t know at first what they had in common.

They had big stories behind them, though. That is the single most valuable gift in my life, that everybody has a story.

“The area we lived in had a big rag trade. I knew a lot of clothing shops were run by a certain sort of person. I didn’t know this word ‘Jew,’ but I can still remember noticing that the women had a similarity. They had a particular accent, and a look in common. Gold rings, hefty chains on their necks and a particular way of dressing. They were big women, and their husbands were tiny guys. Like key-ring husbands. Now I know that their jewelry was their portable wealth.

“I was a Christadelphian, a child member of a small religious sect that set forth a high level of personal responsibility for behavior. My mother and I went to that church on Sundays. My father was a Jehovah’s Witness.

“As I got older, I worked out that the people with the numbers on their wrists had a story that should have been written down. I tried to figure out why soldiers coming back from the war had nightmares, why they slept with knives and guns under their pillows. And got frightened and in scary fights too readily.

“As a little kid, it’s fascinating for this to happen in your house. That a guy would come home late, accidentally wake up his roommate, who is so alarmed that he’s strangling the late-comer. I’m sneaking up the stairs because of the noise … It gave me an attitude toward war: this was the aftermath.

“When I was eight, I discovered that I was adopted. Maybe the story wasn’t told to me in a smart way because the thing I was left with was: ‘I don’t belong here and I am alone.’ I cried and cried until my mother, in her frustration, hit me. Then I thought: ‘I really am alone!’ That cemented it. It was devastating.

“In my eight-year-old way I thought, ‘so I might as well start again, just like these people in the house have. I’m the beginning of a dynasty. Where do I go, what to be in my life? I need to build a new future. Alone.’

“Many years later, I found out that my adoptive mother was my grandmother … and that my own father’s behavior had been inappropriate. But then I was young, and I wanted to shape my world like our house guests were doing …”

Peg Thatcher will lead a workshop series called “Human Potential 101” upstairs at the Moving Arts Studio (MAMA), Monday nights 7-8:30 p.m., starting September 20. The studio is at Carpenter Lane and Greene Street. For more information, call 215-842-1040.

TO BE CONTINUED