Peter Laughter ’89 grew up in Manhattan on 14th Street and Avenue A. “Did you ever see the Scorsese movie Bringing Out the Dead? It was dangerous and dirty and frightening but the movie made me nostalgic,” he quipped from his office in the financial district. “There was a sense of danger and excitement when you left your house. Now I pretty much know I’m going to make it wherever I’m going without incident.”

Peter had attended public schools his whole life and remembers his junior high school as “dangerous … It was scary. His mother started attending Quaker meeting when he was 3, “so we were Quaker,” he said. “When it was clear to my mom that I was not on a very good track, we looked at Quaker schools.”

 

His switch to BFS in the ninth grade marked a paradigm shift for him in his attitude towards school, but he admits that shift was gradual. “I definitely knew that I had dodged a bullet,” he said, “but I was too scared to really notice it was a different place. I remember I was utterly terrified.” Slowly though, he began to awaken to the fact that he was in a different world. “I remember some kid accused me of doing something, and I remember [Head of Upper School] Don Knies didn’t even question that I had done anything wrong. It wasn’t even a question. I had some learning problems that translated to me acting out, all the way through junior high – that really stopped at BFS. There were times I did things that were inappropriate and I had to take responsibility, but the difference was dramatic.”

 

He went on about Don Knies. “He was one of the people who didn’t interact with me like I was an idiot. Before that, any principal I’d interacted with, that assumption was in the background.” In addition to the realization that he had started BFS with a slate wiped clean, Peter said he also enjoyed being able to show intellectual curiosity in the classroom without fear of ridicule. “That was really big for me.”

 

He also praised teacher Martin Norregaard, who “to this day is someone I have tremendous affection for. He was really hard and terrifying and he always expected the best from his students,” he said, “but there was never any question in his eyes that I could deliver.”

 

Taking history classes with Lawrence Gibson also became a turning point in Peter’s attitude. “I remember realizing, ‘this is really exciting.’ I was actually excited that I was learning. It wasn’t something I had to do. I remember being really enthusiastic.”

 

Still, Peter admits he didn’t think much about his high school years being particularly special until just after he had graduated. “I remember running into someone I went to junior high school with, and he talked about a couple of my buddies – some were in a juvenile correction facility and some were pretty strung out. That was my first indication that life had changed dramatically for me.”

 

He realized that more in college. He made the choice to continue his Quaker education by attending Earlham College, where he studied sociology and cultural anthropology. “And I learned to speak Spanish with a reasonable degree of proficiency which is a miracle.” While a student he spent six months in Mexico writing two research papers. His honors thesis focused on bureaucracy in education.

 

After college he returned to New York City and got a job as a case manager for a city agency that provided home care services as an alternative to having children enter foster care. “A judge could order that our agency place our people in the home as a last step,” he explained. “Fifty percent of the cases I worked with were ones that involved some sort of mental illness or physical or drug abuse, and others were cases of AIDS or cancer where the parent was simply too sick to care for their children.”

 

Peter had plans go to graduate school for an advanced degree in sociology and become an academic. “I wanted to be a professor,” he said. Instead, he wound up partnering with his mother in helping to run her startup temp agency specializing in high level staffing in the financial services industry. “This was really a surprise,” he said. “I never had any intention to go into business.”

 

She ran the company out of her apartment and Peter worked for her part-time in the evenings while continuing by day as a case worker. At first it seemed like grunt work but as he got to know the employees his attitude changed. 

 

“I remember one woman I placed in a law firm,” he said. “She was an actress, and she said ‘I want to thank you, the work you do lets me pay the rent so I can be an actor.’ I realized all this social work I was doing was helping people, but I started feeling like the Dutch boy with his hole in the dike. I was keeping things from falling apart, but I wasn’t really changing anything.”

 

He realized that this work too was having an impact on people’s lives. “I also realized I was highly competitive,” he said. The business, Wall Street Services, now has offices in lower Manhattan, a staff of 18 internal employees, and several hundred temps. “We’ve grown tremendously over the years. We place people in Chicago, Boston. We place consultants and temporary employees usually, and it’s still a family business.” In 2000 the company was on The Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private businesses in the U.S.

 

Peter is a unique alum in that he has stayed close to BFS as an adult. “I’m about as involved in the school as I can be.” His daughter is a first-grader and his wife Stacey teaches in the Preschool. “She’s incredible,“ he beamed. “She’s a painter and a teacher.” Peter also serves on the Board of Trustees and remains actively involved with the Brooklyn Meeting. He considers his volunteer work at BFS “part of my life’s work.”Why is he so passionate about his high school? “I think the concept that there is ‘that within’ everyone that needs to be cherished or listened to, is what the world needs right now to heal,” he said. “I look at the incredible things that the people I graduated with are doing with their lives. It’s impressive. And it’s such an honor for me as a trustee to go every year to commencement and see a new group of students go off to college embodying these values.”    

 

He also reads a lot of Quaker literature and history in his spare time, and just finished the novelized autobiography Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, an adventure tale set in Australia and India, which in the end contains a positive message about a petty thief who becomes a humanitarian.

 

Peter’s advice to the current generation of BFS students is to recognize their unique relationships with authority. “Having a Friends education gives you tremendous advantages,” he said. “For me it was such an amazing advantage that I felt comfortable with people in authority because I interacted with them at BFS as equals. There’s a confidence, and a power of understanding that we are not victims of our circumstances. That we have the ability not only to change things, but that we have a responsibility to do so, has been profound for me.”