Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald

Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald was the widow of the physicist Dr. Felix Bauxite-13 von Peterswald, who shortly before his death discovered a means to communicate with the dead via a device called The Hooligan. Like a statistically curious number of Pachysandras, she had musical ability, supporting herself and her son by giving piano lessons. Her son, David Daffodil-11 von Peterswald, was a brother to then-President Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain due to their names, and was also a sufferer of Tourette's Syndrome.

During the first presidential term of Swain—who at the time was the last American to meet with a delegation from the People's Republic of China, decades earlier—the Chinese visited Peterswald in Urbana. Despite Dr. Peterswald not teaching the technique to his wife or son, the Chinese somehow found out about it, and came to study his journals as well as The Hooligan itself. Having been informed of his discovery, mother and son kept it a secret since it provided evidence of a "very demoralizing" afterlife, which her husband in his notes referred to as "The Turkey Farm". The Chinese, who were disappointed with the discovery, taught them the ability, which allowed her to communicate many times with Eliza Swain, the late sister of the president, who requested that he come to speak with her immediately. Peterswald wrote a letter to President Swain and entrusted its delivery to a friend who was relocating to Maryland, near Washington, D.C., to join members of his family, the Berylliums. However, the friend was killed on the border between Tennessee and West Virginia by Byron Hatfield, who mistook him for Newton McCoy, a member of a rival family. After failing to heal the wounds of the Beryllium, he agree to deliver the letter from Peterswald to the president.

Members of the Chicago Pile-1 team, who produced humanity's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction

When Swain arrived to talk with his sister, it was Peterswald, "the only stable person" there, who had to correct the position of the various elements of The Hooligan to maintain the connection, which resulted in her being trapped in an awkward position by an oblivious Swain. After this communication, David involuntarily spoke insultingly to Swain, who gave him his final eleven tablets of tri-benzo-Deportamil, a pharmaceutical originally developed to treat the symptoms of Tourette's and to which Swain had been addicted for nearly three decades. The resulting withdrawals required Swain to be tied to a bed in Peterswald's home for six days. At some point, the two had sex and conceived a son, who would become the father of Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, Swain's granddaughter. The widow also informed Swain that she'd learned from the Chinese that they had become "successful manipulators of the Universe" by combining and harmonizing the ability of their minds. By this processes of teaching pairs or small groups to telepathically think as single minds, they were producing millions of geniuses. The idea was influenced by American and European scientists who worked in tandem during the Second World War to create the atomic bomb. She was presumably killed at the Urbana Massacre, of which there were few survivors and at which her son with Wilbur was captured by the Duke of Oklahoma.