The Foreign Service Journal, March 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2019 75 tion Catholic Church, the Yale Club and DACOR. He was also a participant in the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Oral History project. n Betsy Ross Peters , 90, a retired For- eign Service officer, died at the Hospice of Laramie House in Laramie, Wyo., on Nov. 21, 2018, just 20 days after the death of her husband, Dr. Oliver Leon Peters. Mrs. Peters was born in Pine Bluff, Ark., in January 1928, to Jimmie Sidney Nall Ross and Eric Mansfield Ross, a WorldWar I veteran. When she was 12, the family bought a farm andmoved to Dumas, Ark., where she attended high school. She attended Baylor University, where she met Oliver Peters. They graduated together in 1949, and she went on to com- plete a master’s degree at the University of Maryland. They married in September 1950, andMrs. Peters went to work as a claims representative for the Social Secu- rity Administration. She often visited people in their homes to sign themup for the relatively new program, so they could collect the proper benefits. Because she had witnessed wide- spread poverty during the Great Depres- sion, she was determined to bring Social Security to anyone who qualified. The couple moved to Laramie in 1964, andMrs. Peters returned to academia as a lecturer in the history department at the University of Wyoming. She later com- pleted a Ph.D. in history, the first to do so at UW. While raising her family, Betsy Peters took on several administrative jobs, includ- ing Wyoming director of the 1980 Census and state chair of the National Endow- ment for the Arts. She was instrumental in helping to create UW’s Outreach School for distance learning and adult education. She traveledWyoming with various music, theater, library and art programs