Her Father's Desk

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Posted on June 15, 2026 by

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Dr. Karen Peterson's desk fits the midcentury era of the Humanities Building, but a desk like hers wasn’t built to live within concrete block walls.

It’s the desk of an executive with a list of bank presidents and their phone numbers taped on the sliding shelf — the kind you would pull out for extra space when the desktop got cluttered with 20th century tools like ledgers, desk calendars, paperweights and such. It shows its age, having lived in storage above the College of Education and Professional Studies before making its way to Humanities 263, Peterson’s office.

It was the desk of her late father, the University’s first president, Dr. Frederick P. Whiddon. For years it anchored his office in the administration building now named after him. “He had a lot of books … and pictures of us on the bookshelf,” says Peterson. “He had his desk, and then he had a credenza behind him with a bunch of phones. Because he had to have what they called a WATS line, one that you can make long distance calls without paying extra.”

A photo from 1985 shows a large ashtray on the edge of the desk, a courtesy for visitors. Whiddon is photographed receiving the final settlement papers for a case brought against the state by the University and the USA Foundation that ended up securing their claim to oil and gas revenues from submerged Mobile Bay acreage at Grant’s Pass.

Behind him is a gathering of faculty and staff, including Gordon Moulton (far left), who succeeded Whiddon as president, and Maxey Roberts (seventh from right), then the University attorney and now the managing director of the USA Foundation. Written on the top right of the photo is a note from Whiddon to Clinton King, a research consultant who donated the photo to South’s Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library: “Thanks for sharing the moment.”

Peterson came into possession of the desk soon after she started as an English instructor at the University in 2004. (She finished her bachelor’s degree at South in 1984 and earned a Ph.D. at the University in 2020.) After she was hired, she was notified by then-Deans Dr. David Johnson (Arts and Sciences) and Dr. Richard Hayes (Education) of its existence.

“They arranged for me to go get it,” Peterson says. “So I called one of the fraternities, Pi Kappa Phi — my husband was chapter adviser there — and asked them if they would come and help me move it. We picked it up out of the attic, put it in the back of one of their trucks and brought it over here.”

She keeps a Newton’s cradle on it, just like the one her father used to have. She remembers as a child lifting the outer steel ball and letting it clack against the next — energy transferred from one to the other.

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