This article was written by parishioner Al Heavens.
Charles P. Peitz, whose editing skills and encyclopedic knowledge guided St. Peter’s Church: Faith In Action for 250 Years to publication in 2011, died of lung cancer August 23 in Haddonfield at age 62.
I knew Charlie at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was fine arts editor from 2000 to 2007, after having spent the previous decade at The Farm Journal, and when we were searching for an editor for the book, I immediately thought of him.
His task was almost impossible. The Middlebury College graduate who also was an editor at The Wall Street Journal had to take thousands of words and hundreds of photographs and get them in shape for designer Amy Junod in a matter of a few weeks for Temple University Press. The fact that he did so while maintaining good humor and an even temper testifies to the kind of professional Charlie was.
“By his own account, his proudest literary achievement was co-editing a book on St. Peter’s Church, the 250-year-old Episcopal church at Third and Pine Street,” according to Charlie’s obituary in The Inquirer.
He joined the co-authors of the book at the presentation of the Laurence Fish Award for Parish History at the cathedral in November 2014.
Charlie’s sense of humor was legend. At the end of his funeral on Sept. 2 at Christ the King Church in Haddonfield, his casket left the church to a recording of Wagner’s “The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.”