Born into a family steeped in the American experience, a distant cousin of Roger Sherman, the brothers William Tecumseh Sherman and John Sherman, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with recent immigrant blood from Sweden, Gotland, Devonshire England and Jewish towns in Galizia mixing with branches that came to this land at every earlier part of its history to the Mayflower and others whose roots are forever shrouded in mystery, Carl Peter Klapper grew up with a strong sense of responsibility for our Republic and a keen interest in helping it and its citizens realize their promise and destiny. He learned to read when he was three and also showed an early aptitude for mathematics and music. Accelerating through his education wherever allowed, he used his free time when not working ahead starting many of the books and musical compositions he would complete later in life.
After graduating from high school ninth in his class, he attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where he studied mathematics and economics, as well as a broad range of other subjects, including Latin poetry and history. When Representative John B. Anderson from Illinois came to speak at Grinnell's Herrick Chapel, he was so impressed by a comment by Mr. Klapper about resource taxation in the question and comment period after his talk, that he approached him afterwards to say "You are a very wise man."
His graduation from Grinnell was followed by a four year career as an Industry Economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. While there, Mr. Klapper wrote several letters to the editor of The Washington Post on the issues of the day, including the removal of the restrictions made by Regulation Q on the rates banks could pay their depositors, for which he also lobbied personally and by letter. Mr. Klapper continued writing poetry and prose and composing music and songs, as well as playing in the Greenbelt Band, singing in the Oratorio Society of Washington and playing rugby for Club Sudamericano de Rugby aka "Sud".
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