About Rich Peterson
Founder of and Spokesman for WMCA
(WORKING MIDDLE CLASS FOR GOVERNMENTAL REFORM)
Rich Peterson is a semi-retired "country boy" who drives AM & PM school bus routes, and also operates a part-time home-based business. For the last seven years, his household Adjusted Gross Income, plus social security and veterans disability compensation, has been running between thirty and forty thousand dollars per year. Throughout his adult life, he's been more interested in accumulating knowledge than in accumulating wealth.
Rich got his eight years of grade school education in a one room country school house, and attended a small town high school. He never graduated from college, but attended Purdue University for 2 years after graduating from high school, and then went to the University of Wisconsin for 2 semesters after returning from military service.
He was born in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, and grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. He remembers his parents talking with neighbors and relatives, discussing how they were managing to survive the rough times. As he got older, he started to read about the depression, trying to understand what caused it. This led to the study of the economy in general, and the factors that affect it, either favorably or adversely. He found out that there's a lot of strings being pulled behind the scenes that most of the American public is not aware of.
He's had quite a broad range of work experience including: farming, road construction (operating a jackhammer and a wagon drill in a stone quarry), taxi cab driver, worked in an auto parts store, roofer, machinist, machine electrician, driving instructor, worked in a plastics factory, and school bus driver.
He was also the owner of a financial services company doing income tax preparation and helping individuals who had gotten themselves deeply in debt but who didn't want to declare bankruptcy.
He has been a musician/entertainer since high school days, playing clubs, dance halls, etc. He took on the stage name of "Dick Sherwood". (for the entertainment business)
In the early 1960's he did the weekly, one-half hour Dick Sherwood TV Show, which originated out of the studios of WISC-TV in Madison, Wisconsin. As time went on, other TV stations were added, and by the end of the fourth year, a total of five Wisconsin cities were broadcasting the Dick Sherwood Show: Madison, Green Bay, Wausau, Eau Claire, and La Crosse.
For quite some time, Rich Peterson has seen the need for the voting public to unite, and organize, for the purpose of cleaning up our government.
When the primaries were over, and it turned out that Barack Obama was to be the Democratic Presidential candidate, Rich became concerned, because he knew that our national security would be put in jeopardy.
As the Presidential campaign got further along, and Obama started to lay out his approach to the economic crisis, Rich became more and more concerned that his approach would put our economy right down the tube.
As Obama's plans for this country became more evident, it suddenly became an immediate necessity to unite, and organize, to try to prevent Obama from becoming President of our country.
Rich took his available cash and meager life savings (leaving a balance of $5.37 in his savings account) to get WMCA off the ground.