Jacob Elmo “Pete” Peterman Jr. & Zesta Gertrude Corkle

A Farm Boy in a Changing World

Before dawn, long before the school day began, Pete Peterman knew the sounds of a working Iowa farm: livestock stirring in the barn, doors opening against the cold, machinery waiting for another day, and the footsteps of adults whose work began before sunrise. Born on March 12, 1924, in East River Township, Page County, Iowa, Jacob Elmo Peterman Jr.—known through much of his life as Pete—entered a world that generations of Petermans would have recognized immediately.

He was the son of Jacob Elmo Peterman Sr. and Jessie Gorley Thompson Peterman. He grew up with his surviving sisters Wilma Wyleen and Violet Mary Ann; the family's youngest child, Margery Elaine, died in infancy. The farm was not simply where the family lived. It organized their days and shaped their expectations. Children learned early that land, labor, weather, livestock, machinery, and family survival were tied together.

Pete attended High Prairie School, one of the one-room schools that dotted rural Iowa, and later attended high school in New Market. His was the last Peterman generation to grow up with one foot in the old agricultural world and the other in the new. The work habits were inherited from fathers and grandfathers, but the tools were changing. Horses and hand labor increasingly gave way to tractors, trucks, gasoline engines, and mechanized equipment.

A World at War

World War II pulled Pete far beyond the familiar boundaries of Page County. He served in the United States Navy, joining millions of young Americans whose lives were suddenly widened by military service. The discipline and adaptability demanded by the Navy were new in setting but not entirely new in character; the habits of responsibility and work had been planted long before on the farm.

First Marriage and a Divided Family Branch

While still a young serviceman, Pete married Myrtle Michele “Mickey” Lewis on March 12, 1943, in Maryville, Missouri. Their marriage belonged to the wartime world of hurried decisions, separation, and young people trying to build adult lives while the future remained uncertain. Later that year, their daughter, Glenda Eilleen Peterman, was born in Clarinda.

The marriage did not endure. The divorce became complicated and was not yet final when Pete and Zesta began trying to establish a life together. Glenda ultimately grew up largely apart from Pete’s later Clarinda household, creating a separate but important branch of the Peterman family story. This is one of the places where the neat lines of a genealogy chart fail to capture the complexity of real family life.

Zesta Corkle: Loss, Loyalty, and the Search for Home

Zesta Gertrude Corkle came to adulthood carrying a very different inheritance. Born October 11, 1926, in Hot Springs, South Dakota, she was the daughter of Robert James Corkle and Violetta Gertrude Brown. Her childhood was marked by loss and instability. Her father left the family when she was young, and her mother died while Zesta was still a child. Zesta and her younger brother, Robert Harold “Bob” Corkle, spent time in an orphanage before being raised by their grandmother Brown.

That history did not define all of Zesta, but it helps explain the remarkable importance she later placed on friendship, correspondence, family gatherings, and maintaining human connections. Home had once been uncertain. As an adult, she became a maker and keeper of home.

During the war years, Zesta married Samuel Frank Scott, a high school friend, and followed him to Idaho for military training while she worked at the USO in Coeur d’Alene. It was during this period that the lives of two young couples—Pete and Mickey, Zesta and Sam—first crossed. No one could have known that those wartime acquaintances would eventually become part of the same family story.

Years later, when Greg told his mother about Stephen, Zesta responded with characteristic directness and warmth. There was no elaborate discussion. She simply widened the family circle.

A Marriage Across the High Plains

By 1947 Pete was trying to rebuild a civilian life and return to the farming world. According to family recollection, many people believed that Pete and Zesta had already married in Maryville when she moved from South Dakota to Iowa. The reality was more complicated: Pete’s divorce from Mickey was not yet final. At the same time, he was trying to rent or buy a farm, and the owner wanted a married, settled tenant. In a small rural community, private circumstances, reputation, and economic opportunity could become tightly intertwined.

Once the legal obstacles were resolved, Pete and Zesta were officially married on August 26, 1947, in Raton, Colfax County, New Mexico. Pete’s parents, Jacob Elmo Sr. and Jessie, traveled with them. Their presence makes the journey more than a simple wedding trip: it was a family passage, with one generation accompanying another into a new beginning.

The Wreck Near Laytonville

After the marriage, the four continued west toward California. Near Laytonville, their automobile was struck by a lumber truck carrying large redwood logs. The collision was violent. Pete suffered a serious cut to his upper arm and shoulder. Zesta was injured by glass in her eye and permanently lost sight in that eye. Jacob Elmo Sr. went through the windshield and sustained a closed head injury. Jessie was the only one of the four not severely injured.

All four were hospitalized. Back in Iowa, Wyleen and her husband Irvin traveled west to help bring the family home. The accident became one of the defining events of Pete and Zesta’s early married life. They returned to Iowa not merely as newlyweds but as people already tested by physical injury, fear, and dependence on family.

From Farm Work to Peterman Tractor

After returning from naval service, Pete worked for a time painting and repairing the former prisoner-of-war camp at Clarinda so the buildings could be repurposed as housing. He also worked at Opitz Ford doing automobile body painting. These jobs placed him around engines, tools, paint, metal, repair work, and the machinery that increasingly defined postwar America.

Pete’s father, Jacob Elmo Peterman Sr., helped finance his entry into business. With that support, Pete established a Ford tractor dealership in Bedford and later moved the operation to Clarinda. The decision was practical, entrepreneurial, and deeply connected to family history. Pete came from generations of farmers, but instead of farming only his own acres, he positioned himself at the center of agricultural modernization.

For the Petermans, the movement from animal power to mechanical horsepower had unfolded across generations. Earlier ancestors had cleared land with hand tools and worked with horses. Pete sold and serviced machines capable of doing in hours what once took days.

The dealership also became a family place. Pete employed several school friends, blending business with long-standing personal loyalties. Greg remembered sweeping the shop, mowing the dealership lawn, receiving small amounts of pay, and depositing that money into a savings account with his father’s encouragement. He remembered tractor-pulling contests, the smell and noise of the shop, and riding in a large flatbed truck to Kansas City to bring back tractors and equipment.

These were ordinary errands at the time. In memory, they became lessons in work, responsibility, thrift, and the companionship of father and son.

The Clarinda Years

Pete and Zesta’s family grew in Clarinda. Dalaina was born in 1950, Gregory Craig on New Year’s Day in 1953, and Galen Leon in 1958. The household they created became the center of the modern Peterman family remembered by the next generation.

The home was active and sociable. A large lawn and basement recreation room drew neighborhood children. Zesta served as a Den Mother for Cub Scouts, organizing crafts and activities. Pete expected his children to work. Greg delivered newspapers, shoveled snow, mowed lawns, and helped at the dealership.

Faith remained important, though the family’s religious life was more complicated than a simple denominational label. Pete and Zesta participated in Methodist church life and Bible study, while at times seeking other arrangements for their children’s religious education when they became dissatisfied with changes in their congregation. Their response reflected a faith that was both serious and practical: the institution mattered, but scripture and conscience mattered more.

Family adventures became part of the children’s memories. There were camping and fishing trips to Viking Lake and Lake of Three Fires, picnics and hikes at Waubonsie State Park, annual excursions to Nebraska City for apples and cider, trips throughout the American West, and visits to South Dakota that kept Zesta connected to her brother Bob and her earlier life.

Belly Acres: A Return to the Land

In 1968, Pete and Zesta returned more directly to farming when they bought a farm of roughly 300 acres in East River Township in partnership with Zesta’s brother Bob Corkle and his wife Shirley. The property included two houses. Bob and Shirley occupied the more modern farmhouse on the west side, while Pete, Zesta, and their children lived in the older house.

The arrangement began with optimism. Pete brought farm experience, machinery, and business knowledge. Bob and Shirley brought family connection and a willingness to try a new life. But farming with relatives proved more difficult than the dream. The partnership lasted only a few years and eventually ended in acrimony. Zesta and Bob, siblings who had survived the upheavals of childhood together, were estranged for years afterward.

The episode is important precisely because it resists romanticizing the farm. Land could anchor families, provide independence, and preserve tradition. It could also become the place where differing expectations, finances, personalities, and work habits were exposed.

Harlingen: Friendship, Faith, and Retirement

In retirement, Pete and Zesta carried one of their happiest shared interests south with them: square dancing. In Harlingen, Texas, they became part of a retirement community that drew people from across the country. The routines had changed from East River Township and Clarinda, but familiar themes remained—friendship, church, social life, and the deliberate creation of community.

Greg often visited at Christmas. One year, the children and their families surprised Pete and Zesta by gathering in Harlingen together. For parents who had spent decades building family around work, travel, church, and home, the Christmas reunion gathered those strands into a single memory.

Glenda: The Daughter Who Grew Up Far Away

While Pete built his second family with Zesta in Iowa, his first daughter Glenda grew up largely apart from them in the Pacific Northwest. Her life became a separate Peterman branch shaped by different places, relationships, and experiences.

Glenda’s distance from Pete and his second family is one of the more poignant threads in the chapter. Genealogy can make a family appear orderly, but lived history is rarely so clean. Divorce, geographic distance, silence, and remarriage can create separate worlds among people who share blood.

After Pete and Zesta’s deaths, Greg initiated and maintained correspondence with Glenda until her death. That later connection did not erase decades of separation, but it acknowledged a relationship that had long existed on the family tree even when it had not existed fully in everyday life.

A Bridge Between Two Worlds

Pete and Zesta’s generation stands between the pioneer past and living memory. Pete was born into the old farm world of East River Township but lived into the age of tractors, dealerships, interstate highways, national travel, and dispersed families. Zesta began life amid instability but spent adulthood creating connections—through children, letters, friends, church, square dancing, caregiving, and a fierce loyalty to those she loved.

Their marriage lasted more than forty years but did not last until death. They divorced in Cameron County, Texas, in 1991. That fact belongs in the story, but it does not define all that preceded it. Their decades together included the aftermath of war, first marriages, the Raton wedding, the 1947 wreck, children, business, church, vacations, farming, retirement friendships, and the complicated work of building a life.

Pete died in Clarinda on May 24, 1998, at age seventy-four. Zesta died the following year, October 31, 1999, at age seventy-three. They are buried side by side in Memory Cemetery. Their shared grave does not simplify their marriage; it simply marks the enduring fact that their lives had been intertwined for most of adulthood.

The family they created continued through Dalaina, Greg, Galen, Glenda, their children, and later descendants. Some remained closely tied to Iowa. Others moved outward, following the old Peterman pattern of adaptation to new places and opportunities.

Pete never wrote a family history, and Zesta never imagined that one would someday be written. Yet the lessons they passed along—the value of work, the importance of connection, the comfort of faith, the ability to start again after disappointment, and the knowledge that family can be both inherited and chosen—became part of the legacy carried forward.

The earlier Peterman generations survive largely through deeds, church registers, wills, censuses, military rolls, and faded photographs. With Pete and Zesta, the record changes. Their generation can still be heard in remembered phrases, childhood stories, road trips, shop floors, family photographs, letters, and the recollections of their children.

That is why this chapter occupies a special place in the family story. It is the bridge between history and memory.

Selected Timeline

1924

Jacob Elmo “Pete” Peterman Jr. born in East River Township, Page County, Iowa.

1926

Zesta Gertrude Corkle born in Hot Springs, South Dakota.

1943

Pete marries Mickey Lewis; daughter Glenda is born later that year.

World War II

Pete serves in the United States Navy.

1947

Pete and Zesta marry in Raton, New Mexico; soon afterward the family is seriously injured in the Laytonville, California, collision.

1950

Dalaina Peterman born.

1953

Gregory Craig Peterman born.

1958

Galen Leon Peterman born.

1968

The family returns to farming in East River Township in the partnership remembered as “Belly Acres.”

1991

Pete and Zesta divorce in Cameron County, Texas.

1998

Pete dies in Clarinda.

1999

Zesta dies in Clarinda.