Mary Lou Peak

BOISE – A pioneering woman physician, devoted wife, mother, and friend passed peacefully from this life at the age of 96, surrounded by the love of her family, on Tuesday, September 20, 2022, in Boise, Idaho.

Born to Jesse Pierce and Lois Parke Pierce, Mary Lou grew up in a log cabin on an eighty-acre ranch in Malta, Idaho, in the era before running water or electricity. She used to gaze at the Sublett mountains surrounding the valley and dream of going beyond them. Her heart was set on becoming a nurse, a bold step beyond the mountains for a woman of that time. Gifted with incredible stamina for hard work, a truly amazing memory, and a caring and helpful heart, she was salutatorian of her high school class and soon entered nursing school in the U.S. Army Cadet Nurse Corps during World War II. She described her graduation as one of the proudest moments of her life.

Fascinated by how the human body works and wishing to help those who are suffering, she resolved to become a physician. Despite social expectations that women belonged in the home, and discouragement from many male colleagues, she entered medical school as one of three women in a class of forty-seven men. She paid her own way through medical school, working nights, summers, and weekends as a surgical and post-operative special-duty nurse in what later became the field of intensive care. She graduated in 1952 among the top of her medical school class.

She took a summer job at Dugway Proving Ground, conducting medical examinations and providing treatment to soldiers testing radiological, chemical, and biological weapons during the Korean War. There, she met her husband and beloved life companion of sixty-seven years, Lieutenant Ralph Peak, a chemical engineer, who first noticed her when she gave him an immunization in a shot line. He was supportive of her professional career, and they shared the then-rare belief that both husband and wife can have professional careers while raising a family. They were wed two days after her medical school graduation.

Although her dream was to become a neurosurgeon, residencies were closed to women at the time. Simultaneously with the birth of her first child, she passed her medical school board exams and then completed a residency in pediatrics. As the family grew to six children, she followed her husband’s career in chemical engineering from Seattle to Lewiston, Idaho, to Uravan, Colo., where she established her own medical clinic, and then back to Seattle again. While raising and guiding six children, she practiced full-time pediatric and family primary care.

When the new field of emergency medicine emerged, in the 1970s she became one of its first specialists. As one of the first woman doctors in Pocatello, she set up a new full-time emergency room at Bannock Hospital and managed it for a number of years. Again, following her husband’s career, the family moved to Casper where she became the director of Natrona County Hospital’s small part-time emergency care center, developing it into a busy twenty-four-hour emergency room. When Ralph accepted a job in Winnemucca, she practiced emergency medicine at the hospital in nearby Elko. In the final decade of her career, she practiced at Black Hills Hospital Emergency Room in Olympia, receiving numerous awards. After practicing medicine non-stop for forty-eight years, she retired in 2000, after treating thousands of patients and saving many lives in the process.

Mary Lou was a caring and attentive wife and mother; she and Ralph emphasized education, high moral values, loyalty, fairness, patriotism, and concern for others. They never missed a child’s birthday, concert, Scout trip, or graduation. Each of her friends was a life-long friend, and she cherished the people and places she had known or visited.

Mary Lou and Ralph devoted themselves to restoring her childhood home, a historic cabin on the ranch in Malta. It is the family gathering place, where multiple generations continue to spend happy times together. They also established the Pierce Parke Peak Family Foundation to provide scholarships in the fields of medicine and engineering to students at Malta High School and grants to the town of Malta for education and community projects.

Mary Lou was a loyal and loving fan of her family, friends, and the Seattle Mariners. Even in the last hours of her life, she remembered birthdays and anniversaries with cards and gifts, and the Mariners’ game schedules and scores.

Mary Lou leaves behind six grateful children and their spouses, as well as eleven grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, many friends, and countless patients, the lives of all of whom she profoundly enriched.

Friends and family can pay their last respects on Wednesday, September 28, at Summers Funeral Home, located at 3629 East Ustick Road, Meridian. A viewing at 10:00 a.m. will be followed by a service at 11:00 a.m. Mary Lou Pierce Peak will be laid to rest in her hometown of Malta, beside her parents, her siblings, and her husband, at Valley Vu Cemetery at noon on Thursday, September 29. She was the last among her many siblings and cousins, and with her passes another of the heroes of the Greatest Generation, and a woman pioneer in the field of American medicine.

Arrangements have been placed in the care of Rasmussen-Wilson Funeral Home of Burley.

A live webcast of the Funeral Service will be available and maintained at the following link: https://youtu.be/aNSwevybgKw.