I was born February 20, 1923. My early years were spent at the family ranch in Manila, Utah with my parents Heber and Vera Bennion, who took me there when I was a baby.

I went to Eastside High School in Salt Lake City in the 1940s. And then to the Agricultural College of Utah in Logan (now Utah State University).

During high school I spent my summers at the sheep ranch in Manila. I was a real cowgirl riding horses, roping calves, gathering eggs and chasing geese. I learned physical stamina on the ranch. I loved to get on a horse and go off exploring different parts of the rivers and canyons by myself.

I was attracted to the theater and was in many plays in college. War was declared while I was at UAC. I went back to Salt Lake and attended the University of Utah. I wrote feature articles for the Salt Lake Tribune and then went to Hollywood and began writing for movie magazines. I had a regular column called I Had a Date With. The studio arranged dates between me and some of the top stars and then I wrote about what the date was like with a particular star. I went out with Burt Lancaster, Rex Harrison and many other leading stars of the day. A photographer would follow us and take pictures. There’s a picture of me with Burt Lancaster in Chinatown and we are throwing pennies in a pond with swans.

After three years of writing for movie magazines, I decided I wanted to be a star rather than write about them, so I went to New York where I attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts. For the next five or six years I went around from agent to agent looking for a job. I finally got one in a touring version of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. I met Joseph Papp and we fell in love, and when we got back to New York we got married.

Joe and I were both interested in the theater and Joe raised the money to build a Shakespeare Theatre in Central Park. We believed that art was for the people, not just for those with money. So we started a free theater. That theater has lasted 50 years and given millions of people the privilege of seeing Shakespeare for free. I acted in some of the first Shakespeare plays that Joe produced.

We had two children, Miranda and Tony. Joe and I separated after 22 years. Before that I decided to give up the theater and go back to school to get my degree in social work. I worked at the Ackerman Institute for the Family for 50 years and developed a technique on working with families called sculpting. It became very popular and I was asked to do many workshops and presentations of my work in many different countries throughout the world. I gave workshops on this particular technique in 30 countries and in every state in the union.

One summer when I was home from school, my father Heber Bennion and I were on a mountain herding a huge herd of sheep. At that time the family was dependent on the sheep raised on the ranch. We got word that a terrible storm was coming and we had to get the sheep back to the ranch, which was 15 miles away. My father and I started to drive the sheep down the mountain. It was night and the sheep didn’t want to move so we literally had to beat them to get them to move, and carry them across ravines, deep canyons and dangerous rivers. 

It was a nightmare, I was so tired but I had to just keep going. My father kept saying to me, ”Keep going Peggy, just keep going.” It was a big lesson that came back to me over and over again in my personal life.

Later on when my daughter Miranda was a teenager, whenever Miranda was sleeping too late in bed I would go in and say “Get out of that bed, your great great great grandmother (Rebecca Winters) walked across the plains pushing a handcart!”  But it had no effect on Miranda who said “Oh mother, that story makes me so tired...I have to go back to sleep again!”

My sister Virginia Buchanan and I were supposed to be herding the sheep one night. We loved Western stories, and we were reading some Western books by the lamp light in the sheep tent, when all of a sudden we saw car lights coming up the road.  We were terrified because this was our land, and we thought they were robbers coming to steal our sheep!  My sister ran outside the tent, dramatically threw a bridal on the horse and said “Peggy give me my gun!” I gave her the gun and she shot it in the air to scare them away. Then we heard the voice of my father saying “You sure are a bad shot!”

Out at the ranch, my mother Vera Bennion used to listen to the Metropolitan Opera from New York City on a tiny radio. One day she was listening to a great opera singer of the time, Gladys Swarthout, and my mother said “She’s coming out on stage, she’s wearing a blue dress and a pink sash.” After the opera my mother turned around and said “You kids get out there and be somebody, don’t get stuck in the mud like I did.” 

So my whole life is based on trying to bring the thrill of the stage and plays and opera and beautiful things to my mother who I felt so acutely was deprived of these beautiful things in life. Every time I thought of being an actress and getting all the applause, my mother would always be sitting in the front row. The play about my life should be called “My Mother on the Front Row.”

When my mother did come to New York, she stayed with me and Joe and we didn’t have enough money to take her to the opera, but she saw it advertised and she said “I think I’ll just go down there and see if there are any tickets that are being given away.” She waited and waited until everybody had gone in and (this is a true story) there was a very good looking man in a cape outside the theater, standing there waiting for somebody. He came over to my mother, held out his arm and said “Madam please, be my guest” and my little old barnyard mother went in on the arm of this beautiful sophisticated man, and they sat in the front row and saw the opera.

One time we took her to a party where there were a lot of very rich people, and it got around that there was a little old pioneer woman there. Everybody was coming over to me and saying where is that little pioneer woman I want to dance with her! My mother had never been so popular and never had such a good time. All the handsome young men wanted to dance with this little old pioneer woman. My mother was queen of the dance.

I wanted to be a ballet dancer when I was young, and my mother scrubbed floors in order to pay for me to take lessons. I’ll never forget when I got my first pair of ballet toe slippers, I was dancing in my class and my teacher (who was very tough) came over and said “Take off your shoes.” My feet were bleeding and she said “You’ll never be a ballet dancer, you have fallen arches.” That was the end of my ballet career thank God, because It would’ve been a terrible life and I don’t think I had the talent to be great.