Peter Paul Bedesem

1870s

Born 21 January 1870 in Philadelphia, the youngest known child of his family. After his father died he was sent to California, where in 1880 he was living with Dominican sisters in San Francisco.

1880s

Lived with Father Walrath in Colusa, learned to set type, and apprenticed at the Colusa Sun. Badly burned by Roman candles in 1884. Left Colusa in 1885 for a ranch in Woodland and later returned to Philadelphia.

1890s

A printer, compositor, and linotype operator in Philadelphia. Married Mary McCormick on 15 June 1898 and took second place in the newspapermen's shuffleboard tournament that December.

1900s–1910s

Son Paul was born in 1900, followed by Mildred, Vincent, and Margaret Rosemary. Captained the Philadelphia Record's bowling team in 1903–04. Bought a house on Apsley Street in Germantown in 1904 and founded the Oakdale Composition Company in 1914.

1920s–1950s

Ran Oakdale with his son Paul. Widowed in 1932. Revisited Colusa in 1940 after 55 years. Lived for a time in Miami, and died in Philadelphia on 15 April 1951.

An Orphan in the West

Peter Paul Bedesem was born on January 21, 1870, in Philadelphia, the youngest known child of his family; his older sisters were Magdaline, Helena, and Sara, and another baby had died at birth in 1866. After his father died, his mother sent him to a Catholic home in California. In 1880, at ten, he was living at 121 Tyler Street in San Francisco in a household of five Dominican sisters and two other young boarders, and he also lived for a time at a Catholic home in San Rafael.

Around 1882 he came from Marysville to Colusa, in the Sacramento Valley, to live with the parish priest, Father Walrath, and the priest's nephew. "I'd say he was a task master," Peter remembered. "He was not opposed to a boy enjoying himself, but he insisted that everybody should be doing something – no one should be idle." Peter helped plant trees in the town's Catholic and Protestant cemeteries, and he rode along with the priest on his rounds collecting money for a new church. Around 1883 Father Walrath bought him two cases of type, and Peter learned to set type by hand. He and the nephew once ran away, getting as far as Willows before a cook who had heard about them caught them, and after that Peter was not allowed back at the priest's house.

The Colusa Sun

On Father Walrath's recommendation, the editor of the Colusa Sun, Will S. Green, took Peter on as an apprentice and gave him a place to live. He worked his way up to compositor, "kicked the Gordon," pumping the foot pedal of the press while feeding it paper, and learned to decipher Green's editorial notes, which he said were scrawled in a way that was "hard to follow."

On November 15, 1884, at Colusa's Democratic Jubilee celebrating Grover Cleveland's election, Peter and another boy, George Kirkpatrick, filled their pockets with Roman candles and shot them at each other at the corner of Fifth and Market. One shot set off the candles in Peter's pocket, and his clothes caught fire. He was carried to the Colusa House with burns over his back, arms, and nearly all of one leg, and at first no one expected him to live, but the burns were not deep and he recovered. He still had the scars more than half a century later. In 1885 he left Colusa for a ranch in Woodland, California, and by 1891 he was back in Philadelphia.

A Philadelphia Printer

Peter spent the rest of his working life in Philadelphia's printing trade, as a printer, compositor, and, as the new machines took over, a linotype operator. In 1894 he was knocked unconscious for an hour when he crashed his bicycle coasting down a steep hill near Jenkintown. On June 15, 1898, he married Mary McCormick, an Irish-born dressmaker. Their son Paul was born in 1900, followed by Mildred, Vincent, and Margaret Rosemary. In 1904 Peter sold their house on North 18th Street and bought a larger one at 132 Apsley Street in Germantown for $4,450, where the family lived until 1922.

He was a keen competitor in the newspapermen's leagues. In December 1898 he beat the favorite, Willie Duffy, in the finals of the Newspapermen's Shuffleboard Tournament, lost first place to Benjamin Franklin Bodine by 94 to 100, and finished second. In the winter of 1903–04, while working as a compositor and linotype operator at the Philadelphia Record, he captained the paper's team, the Nonpareils, in the Morning Newspaper Bowling League, averaging just under 149 over sixty-eight games; in February 1904 the team set a league record for a three-game match.

In 1914 Peter went into business for himself, opening the Oakdale Composition Company, a typesetting shop at Germantown and Sedgley Avenues. He ran it with a partner, Charles F. Miller, until 1916 and then alone, and by 1925 with his son Paul. It was still going in 1940, when Peter was its president and it was setting much of the type for the offset forms used by the Philco Radio Corporation.

Colusa Revisited

Mary died in 1932, and Peter lived on at their home on Cheltenham Avenue. In July 1940, slim, sprightly, and gray-haired at seventy, he traveled alone to Colusa, his first trip west in fifty-five years. He walked the town looking for people he remembered and found Dick Joseph, who remembered seeing him catch fire in 1884, and two other men who vaguely recalled the accident. He planned to visit the cemeteries to see whether the trees he had planted as a boy were still standing, and the local paper ran his story.

In his last years Peter spent time in Miami, boarding in 1949 and 1950 with the family of Merle and Bessie Edwards; Mrs. Edwards cooked for him, and his niece Lucille came to visit. In March 1949 he sent his granddaughter Dolores $100 as a wedding present, and he planned to travel north with his daughter Mildred for her wedding that April. By the spring of 1951 he was living with his son Paul's family on North 17th Street. He died of stomach cancer at Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia on April 15, 1951, at eighty-one, and was buried with Mary at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Cheltenham.