Emmy goes to Wauconda man
Growing up in a middle-class Wauconda neighborhood, John Ross Peterson never came face to face with homelessness.
And, he didn't realize children face this predicament, also.
Now a Los Angeles television show creator for Associated Television, Peterson earned a Daytime Emmy Award for producing a two-hour TV special, "America's Invisible Children: The Homeless Education Crisis in America." It is a documentary about 1.3 million children in the United States considered homeless.
"It's quite a shocking number," the 55-year-old Peterson said in a telephone interview Friday. "When I first heard that, it just got me really interested in the subject."
Most of the Daytime Emmys, awarded by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, were given out Friday in Los Angeles.
Peterson received his Emmy a week earlier at a ceremony in New York.
"I think it's wonderful," said Peterson's mother, Jacque Peterson of Wauconda.
Other nominees for the award included shows produced by Disney, MTV, NBC and another of his own programs, "Who's Who of World Giving," filmed in Kenya.
"We really felt like the little guys in this sea of big guys," Peterson said. "I was very excited about it, shocked. It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience for anybody who is in entertainment."
Producing TV shows was an unlikely career path for Peterson.
After graduating from Wauconda High School in 1970, Peterson attended Southern Illinois University for two years. He later graduated with a bachelor's degree in environmental science and music from Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nev.
Peterson led a folk group called the Serendipity Singers from his Wauconda home in the early 1980s. The group performed television Christmas and holiday specials and had its own syndicated show.
Soon after, Peterson began writing musical scores for TV shows and started producing and shooting them himself.
Peterson's first exposure to homelessness came while producing a documentary in 2006 titled, "Life Below the Line: The World Poverty Crisis," showing slum life in the Nairobi, Kenya, Honduras and Arkansas.
"That kind of gave me my first taste of the poverty that is faced by Americans here," he said. "We decided that this is something that the American public really needs to know and understand so that more can be done."
Peterson filmed the documentary himself in early 2007 in Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Mo., Tampa, Fla., rural Colorado and Rockford.
"I just had to follow the story around the country as I went," he said. "There is so much more to cover on this story around the country, and, yes, in my (hometown) area."
To preview Peterson's documentary, which aired last October on the CW Network, visit www.americasinvisiblechildren.com/index.html.