Katharine Joan Peterken Tate, a beloved mother, grandmother, and friend, passed away on December 29 after a brief illness. She was 92.
Born in New York City on Easter Sunday 1932, to Katharine Von Elling Peterken and Albert Edward Peterken, she was forever called “Bunny” by her family. She was raised in the Bronx by her aunt and uncle, Frederick and Ann Veit, and attended Walton High School. Summers spent in Winsted, Connecticut, gave her time with her mother and sparked a lifelong affection for the New England landscape and life on a lake.
Some of Katharine’s best memories derived from her years as an honors student at Swarthmore College. After graduating in 1953, she taught at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and lived for a time in Greenwich Village. While visiting her uncle in Morocco during the summer of 1951, she met Robert Wood Tate, a Swarthmore alumnus who was an engineer in the U.S. Air Force. They reconnected years later and, after a few dates, married in 1956.
The family lived in California and Washington, D.C., before settling in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1968 with their five children. There Katharine took on the role of landlady to, among others, many Princeton graduate students from all over the world. She took up work outside the home when the children were older and in the 1980s became part of the staff of the development office at Princeton University, a position she held for 10 years. Much of her time in subsequent years was devoted to faithfully caring for her aging aunt and uncle.
Katharine was an excellent cook and enjoyed bringing people together. One friend recalled, “I have such a vivid memory of her … always welcoming, always putting people at ease, and always curious about others.” Many who lived for a time in the Tate’s Victorian house became lifelong friends. The community she built extended to mid-coast Maine, where the Tates spent summers beginning in the 1970s. In her last year, she was still enjoying living in her summer cabin in the woods.
Until her final days, Katharine was thinking about how to feed family and friends, what new tastes she could enjoy, and how to be a good host, while she was watched over by family members and visited by many of her dear friends.
Katharine is survived by her children Jacques Tate (May, deceased), Anne Tate (Robert Massie), Thomas Tate, Laura Tate Kagel (Martin), and Carol Tate (David Schrayer); her half siblings Nancy Connole (Michael) and James Maguire, nieces Valerie Tate (Gregory Arms) and Louise Tate Hood (Murray); longtime friends François Bontoux and Christine Wüthrich; 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. She was predeceased by her husband of 63 years, Robert Wood Tate.
