Peter Laker, 93, was a colorful charmer

A Brit by birth, Peter Laker told his daughter he wanted to live to 100 so he could, as is custom, receive a letter of congratulations from the queen.

Barbara Laker, knowing her father’s penchant for the extreme, said he would probably end up with a visit from Her Majesty as well.

“And I really think that,” said Barbara, a reporter for The Inquirer. “Both my parents were larger than life, and my dad lived his life on his own terms. They were rebels.”

Mr. Laker, 93, died Monday, April 20, of the coronavirus in a hospital near Chicago.

An “adventurer and a charmer,” Mr. Laker provided a colorful childhood for Barbara and her brother, David.

He loved dogs and dancing and ran a chicken farm in England.

“For summer ‘holiday,’ we drove our tiny Triumph on a ferry to France,” Barbara wrote in a tribute. “We never made it to Paris. ‘Everyone goes there,’ my dad would say. We drove all over the South of France in the green car with red leather seats, my parents smoking Winstons. Each day was a new surprise.”

After arriving in New York from England in the 1950s, Mr. Laker met his wife, Etta, in a Greenwich Village bar. He was Protestant. She was Orthodox Jewish. Both their families, Barbara wrote, were “appalled.” Still, they married and raised their family in England and later outside Chicago. He became a U.S. citizen in 1976. Etta Laker died in 2000.

Mr. Laker loved dogs and dancing. He ran a chicken farm in England. He got arrested for riding a horse too fast in Central Park. And when he was young, he worked as a gigolo on a cruise ship. “Seriously,” Barbara wrote. He also sold insurance.

“When he got the coronavirus, I thought he’d be the first 93-year-old man to beat it,” Barbara wrote. “He’d charm the nurses and convince one of them to run away with him.”

In addition to his daughter and son, Mr. Laker is survived by four grandchildren.

— Gary Miles