'At age 17 a ruptured appendix, requiring a couple of operations, 9 days apart, and a month in the Morden hospital, changed my life. ...
Father was convinced that God had saved me from death for some good reason, but probably not for the hard physical work of farming. So it was arranged that I would live at grandparents [Peters] place the following year where aunt Katherine [Peters], who took a year off from her teaching job, arranged for me to take Gr.9 by correspondence under her supervision. During the next 3 years I completed Grs. X and XI at the Mennonite Collegiate Institute, a residential high school at Gretna, Man., and Gr. XII at the Altona High School in 1940. During the summers I worked on the farm.'