Walter Hamilton Peters III

Walter Hamilton Peters III departed this life after 79 years of unstoppable curiosities and surprising contradictions. As a boy growing up near Dog River and Mobile Bay, he loved all water activities but also rode his bike to the nearest library branch, where he checked out, among other things, blues records and Mein Kampf. During his senior year at McGill Institute, Mobile’s all-boys Catholic high school, he co-captained the football team and played a leading role in Brigadoon.

From his mother, Inez Hannon Peters, he inherited a hyper-alertness to his environment and from his father, Walter H. Peters Jr., an uncanny facility with numbers and the ability to build, repair, and solve problems. A first-generation college student, Wally entered Auburn University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, often remarking that service – not necessarily military – would benefit the country because it brought different people from different places together. Auburn is also where he realized he could spend the rest of his life on a college campus.

Perhaps because he struggled as a college student, Wally was always willing to help his own students as a professor of mechanical engineering. Having earned his PhD at Virginia Tech in 1978, he came to the University of South Carolina to teach in 1980. Through the years he taught and mentored both undergraduate and graduate students, leaving an immeasurable impact on generations of students in the College of Engineering. As a creative thinker, Wally involved himself in various research projects including complex systems, sustainability, biomechanics, and experimental mechanics; and his scholarly work earned thousands of academic citations. He and his mentor, Bill Ranson, were pioneers in Digital Image Correlation (DIC), a powerful optical method for measuring deformation. Widely applied across science and engineering, their seminal papers on DIC continue to be cited by scholars today.

Wally was an experimentalist in the classroom and the kitchen, preparing many varieties of seafood. Sometimes he’d assign his students to cook for a lesson. Unable to buy new when something old could be fixed, he wore decades-old Hawaiian shirts and Birkenstocks that had been resoled since 1980. He loved NASCAR and PBS, soccer and the South Carolina Philharmonic, yoga and old westerns, the mountains of North Carolina and the village of McClellanville, where he had a weekend getaway. He could spend hours designing a house, garden, or barn, and found joy driving his tractor, John Deere cap on his head. He believed in the importance of scouting, the necessity of preserving democracy, man’s responsibility to the environment, intellectual humility, and friendly conversations with strangers.

While he taught a variety of mechanical engineering subjects, winning USC’s most prestigious teaching award, the Amoco Teaching Award, in 2002, he also taught students life lessons, including how to swim, how to ride a bike, and in his back yard at “Wally World,” how to barbecue a hog to perfection. He led students to success at professional conferences, something many would say benefited them in their careers across industry and academia. To him, the teacher-student relationship was sacred, a relationship made clear when many of his students from the class of 1992 honored him with a scholarship in his name, Wally’s Scholars. (https://donate.sc.edu/AG/sfp/cec/dr-wally-peters-scholarship-endowment-fund). He retired from the University of South Carolina in 2018 as a distinguished professor emeritus, but the word “retired” never quite applied: A lifelong teacher and lifelong student, he was himself a virtuous cycle – the kind he had spent a career helping others to see in the complex systems he so loved to teach.

Left to marvel at his memory are his wife, Aïda Rogers, and his three children, of whom he was conspicuously proud: daughters Marti Stilwell (Kirk Porth), Rachel Card (Drew) and son, Dr. Walter Hamilton Peters IV (Dr. Brittany Peters). He also leaves six grandchildren, Ella and Liam Stilwell, Atlas and Euclid Card, and Georgia and Walter Hamilton Peters V. He was predeceased by his sister, Marian Peters, and his parents. He also leaves sisters Barbara Young (Jim), Cecilia Lammers (Dr. Gene Lammers), brother Ed (Cathy), seven nieces, seven nephews, multiple great nieces and nephews, and far too many students to count.