Maryly Van Leer Peck was born on June 29, 1930, in Washington, D.C.. She was the second child and only daughter of Blake Ragsdale Van Leer and Ella Lillian Wall Van Leer. Peck's parents both had strong academic backgrounds and were close friends with renowned intellectuals of their time, including Frank Bunker Gilbreth Sr. and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, which not only exposed Peck very early to engineering, but it also showed her the possibility that she could be one herself. Peck became the valedictorian of her high school class in Georgia, granting her a state-sponsored scholarship. However, at that time, the male-only Georgia Tech university was the only school offering engineering, and even though her father filed a case on her behalf, she didn't have an option but to spend a year at Duke, before transferring to Vanderbilt University in her sophomore year, so that she could major chemical engineering. She received her bachelor's degree with highest honors from Vanderbilt in 1951, while also becoming the first woman initiated into Tau Beta Pi, the honorary engineering fraternity. Four years later, she became the first woman with an engineering master's degree from the University of Florida, where she also received her doctorate in 1963.
Career
While working on her master's degree, Peck started tutoring older students in math-related subjects. This caught the eye of a professor at Florida University, who asked her to substitute for him, while he was away presenting a paper. This was the first of many teaching jobs Peck would have during the following decades. In 1962, as she was finishing her doctoral dissertation, Peck found a job as a propellant and aerospace engineer for Rocketdyne Corporation and United States Naval Research Laboratory in DC. Since she was already a mother of four children by that timethis attracted the interest of journalists and resulted in a 1962 interview for Life magazine. Soon after their marriage, her husband, Jordan Brown Peck, Jr., became an Episcopal priest. She followed him when he decided to do some missionary work in Guam. They will remain there for eleven years. During this period, she would manage to become the first woman dean of the College of Business and Applied Technology at the University of Guam and the founder of what is now the Guam Community College. In 1982 she was selected to be the President of Polk Community College, and she served in this position until 1997. Peck was the first woman to be named president of any of Florida's 26 community colleges. In 2005, Peck received the National Community Service Award by the Daughters of the American Revolution organization. During her tenure, Polk Community College added the Lakeland campus and established a foundation which, by the time she retired, had $5.5 million for scholarships and college equipment. In 1995 Peck was awarded "She Knows Where She's Going" award by Girls, Inc. and later joined their national board. After her retirement in 1997, Peck served as the headmaster of the Episcopal All Saints' Academy and later joined the board for the Vanguard School. She was honored as a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Florida in 1991, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame.
Personal life
Peck married Jordan Brown Peck, Jr. in 1951, the year she received her B.A. The couple had four children. In 1982, Peck became the first women to be admitted into membership of the Winter Haven Rotary Club; afterwards, she also became the first women to be elected President of the same club. In 2003, she was interviewed by Society of Women Engineers for a profile on about her life as a pioneer. She died in West Palm Beach, in 2011, at the age of 81.
