Peter with his dorm mates (from the fourth floor of Burton Hall), Carleton College, 1963; photo courtesy of the Carleton College Archives. Pictured with Peter are, according to the yearbook caption: (second row) P. Cook, H. Bluhm, P. Schwartz, (first row) R: Crider, F. Bara, J. Keenan, W. Pope, I. Johnson (in front) J. Johnsen.
“Funny about that name. You’d never think that there could be two Peter Thorkelsons in any one place at the same time. But there were actually two Peter Thorkelsons in my freshman class. The only difference was their middle initials and the fact that Peter pronounced the first part of his name ‘TORK’ while the other pronounced his ‘Thork.’ Peter usually used his middle initial to keep their identities separate.” - Steve Pope, Flip, October 1967 “As a matter of fact, the interesting thing is that it [Tork] came about because in my Greenwich Village days, I was wearing my father’s high school sweatshirt and it said ‘Tork’ on the back of it because it was his nickname. [Thorkelson] got shortened that way, and for a long time, I wasn’t even Peter Tork, I was just Tork. And some of my friends from back then still just call me Tork as though it were my first name, which is kind of funny.” - Peter Tork, DGB, February 12, 2006 “About the only place where Peter didn’t take his banjo was class, when he went to class. When he did attend classes, he usually went barefooted. All the teachers and professors thought that he was tremendously intelligent, but they would get mad at him because he wouldn’t study. He’d get ‘A’s’ on all his papers, and then ruin all his brilliance by not studying for the final.” - Steve Pope, Flip, October 1967 “While at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., [Bob] Middleton’s roommate was future rock star Peter Tork, who taught him to play the guitar. [Subsequently, in Greenwich Village] Middleton played with Tork and with Peter, Paul and Mary, and briefly with Joan Baez.” - Ellwood City Ledger, July 3, 2019 “[Peter] does not like school. He said: ‘Look at it this way. Schools — public, private and colleges — are strictly vocational institutions. Yeah, you got to have degrees if you want to get somewhere. ‘If you want to think, you do that someplace else. There is no compulsion for schools to teach knowledge. They do not teach wisdom. They do not teach people how to think.’” - Winston-Salem Journal, December 1966 “I studied, but I kept going off on tangents, particularly in my favorite subject, educational psychology. I was interested in so many aspects of it that I couldn’t organize myself. I failed, but I don’t regret it at all. I learned more from educational psychology class than anything else I ever took. I’m sure if I ever teach, it will have helped me a great deal.” - Peter Tork, Seventeen, August 1967 “I wanted desperately to learn, but I was too interested and I kept drifting off into daydreams. Some of the teachers understood, but they couldn’t save me from being thrown out. Grades are the thing. Education is being made as full as a cold fish.” - Peter Tork, Fabulous 208, January 1968 “During his final term [at Carleton], Tork was fascinated by an educational psychology course. ‘I’d be assigned one chapter of a book and I’d read the whole book and skip all of the other assignments,’ he recalls. ‘I was really disorganized — absolutely incapable of doing what was wanted of me.’” - Carletonian, November 1982
