Catching up with Randy Peterson after 31 years behind the fence

If you live in Cowley long enough, you eventually learn the sacred geography of neighborhood fences. Some are purely functional. Some are decorative. And a few are essentially a relationship, built board by board over the years.

Randy Peterson and his family have been neighbors for 31 years -- not next door neighbors but through-the-back-fence neighbors who talk to each other over the fence like Al Borland and Tim Taylor on the “Home Improvement” show and issue friendly complaints about leaves and weeds and why the fence is deteriorating.

 I have always appreciated Randy. For as long as I have known the “Peterson boys,” Randy has been the serious older brother, the quietest one, the one who listens more than he talks. He is steady, thoughtful and not easily ruffled, which is probably why he has survived being my neighbor for three decades.

Still, “appreciating” a person and actually sitting down with them for a real conversation are two different things. We wave, we visit over the fence and we exchange small-town updates, but we do not always take the time to catch up on the bigger story. So it was a genuine gift to sit in Randy’s living room for nearly two hours and simply talk.

I started at the beginning, because that is where you find the roots. Randy is the oldest boy, with an older sister. He graduated from Cowley high school in 1970, back when small schools required you to be “recruited” out of eighth grade because every able-bodied kid was needed somewhere. He played football in the fall, basketball in the winter and track in the spring.

From there, the conversation moved into college and Randy’s first plan, which was to go into medicine. Like a lot of smart kids from small towns, he headed to Ricks College because it was smaller, affordable and felt like a sensible step. Three of them went together and even roomed together. Two left quickly for missions, and Randy stayed because he was not yet old enough to serve for another few months. He did what serious people do. He kept moving forward.

After serving a mission in the Philippines, he returned to his studies and eventually finished his bachelor’s degree in microbiology at BYU in Provo, graduating in 1976. As a bit of a science nerd myself, I’ve always appreciated that in Randy. He told me something I wish I’d heard from every one of my students. For him, microbiology came easier because it was interesting. The labs were real. The work connected him to real life and the real world.

I also learned that Randy wasn’t quite perfect. When Randy arrived at the moment he believed he was ready to graduate, he learned that he was three hours short. Three hours. Not a missing requirement, not a failed class, just a math problem. He had already lined up a lab position with Dr. Donaldson, the dean in the microbiology department, and he had to go back and admit, painfully, that he could not graduate after all.

Dr. Donaldson responded with the kind of kindness that stays with a person. He essentially created a solution. Randy would do an undergraduate seminar, connected to his lab work, and finish those last hours in the summer. Randy told it with humor, but you could hear the gratitude.

For a moment, Randy’s path could have stayed in microbiology. He could have pursued graduate work, taught or gone into research. But life does what it does. Randy was already married to his wife, Karen, and they had a young daughter, and when his dad asked him to come home and help with the family business, the pull of home became hard to resist.

If anyone else had asked, Randy admitted, he likely would have said no. But you do not say no to your dad when your dad is working hard, trying to make a living and trying to keep a family business afloat.

The business story is not just an “office supply” story. It is a Big Horn Basin story, full of hardworking people, changing markets and the slow reality that what worked in one decade gets flattened in the next.

Randy talked a lot about the old vegetable cannery that was started by his grandfather, and those buildings represent a significant part of his childhood. He also talked about how small operations struggled to compete with larger companies. He explained how the family’s connection ran deep, how the plant had been part of a dream and how difficult it was for his dad to watch it go down and even more difficult for his grandfather, who had imagined that it would sustain the family for generations to come.

That line stuck with me, because it applies to so much of Wyoming’s history. You see a crumbling foundation, a weathered building, a cabin that did not make it, and you realize it was not built as a ruin. It was built as hope.

Randy’s working life eventually centered on sales and service and what eventually became the Office Shop. The early days were not glamorous. Cold calls. Long drives. Thin margins. He described the grind honestly, including the moments he wanted out.

Then his dad made a move that changed everything. Instead of being stuck in a job that felt like stocking shelves for someone else’s benefit, Randy was encouraged to create something of his own, to build a retail arm, to run it under the same roof but as his own business. Randy named it “Office Shop,” originally spelled in an older style with an “e” at the end, a detail that some of you will remember.

He also found himself in the kind of work that quietly holds a community together: servicing equipment, keeping businesses running, getting to Worland at opening time, working back toward Cowley, only to find the service board full again. If you ever wondered how small-town businesses keep going, it is people like Randy, driving, fixing, showing up.

And then there is the other kind of service, the kind that does not pay and does not come with office hours.

Randy was called as an LDS Bishop at age 25, a sentence that still feels impossible to say out loud. He described the moment with clarity, how young he felt, how ringing his ears were, how his mind struggled to absorb what was being asked. He also credited the ward members, older and wiser, who supported him.

He told a story that made me laugh. In those days, ward welfare was handled in very practical ways, including keeping a few cows to help fund the program. One morning a rancher called and demanded to know what Randy wanted him to do with a “ward cow,” and he wanted an answer immediately. Randy, a newly called 25-year-old bishop with a backyard and no ranch, did what anyone in his position would do. He called Bob Stevens. Bob’s response was perfect: “You don’t have to ask. Just bring the cow down and put her in my pasture.”

That is Cowley in a nutshell. Chaos, generosity and somebody with a pasture who solves the problem.

Randy later served as a stake president and was eventually called as a mission president in the Oklahoma Tulsa Mission, callings that sound formal on paper but are deeply personal in practice. He spoke of those years not as positions of authority, but as seasons spent walking with people through some of the hardest moments of their lives. I know from tangential experience how much time those callings demand. Much of that work happens quietly, behind closed doors, in long conversations where listening matters more than answers.

As a mission president, that responsibility extended to hundreds of young people far from home, many facing fear, homesickness, illness and self-doubt for the first time. Randy described doing his best to offer steadiness and reassurance, often feeling unprepared but committed to simply being present.

He spoke most tenderly about Karen’s role during those years and the invisible load she carried. She opened their home, managed meals and logistics and provided constant care to missionaries and visitors alike. While Randy was often the one asked to counsel, Karen was frequently the one whose role was less noticed but no less essential, quietly recognizing who needed encouragement and who simply needed to feel cared for. Her service was steady and unassuming, and Randy made it clear that none of those years would have worked without her.

Karen passed away on April 12, 2022, and Randy did not pretend it has been easy. He was honest in a way that was quiet and not dramatic. What keeps him going now, he said, is purpose, including helping his mom several times a day and staying engaged in things that matter.

Near the end of our visit, Randy turned the conversation back toward me and offered a piece of advice that belongs in every retirement plan: find something you care about and throw yourself into it. A person needs a reason to get up, a reason to show up, a reason to keep moving.

As I left Randy’s house and walked around the block, I thought about that fence again. It is still a nice fence. The leaves will still come. I will still pop my head over the top like Al and grumble like it is my job.

But after two hours in Randy Peterson’s living room, the fence feels a little less like a divider and a little more like what it really is: the thin line between two lives that have been running side by side for 31 years, waiting for a good long conversation.

And for the record, Randy, I am still blaming you for all the leaves.