Jack N. Peck's mind is like one of the intricately precise machines
that has kept his business, Mercury Tool & Machine, Inc., thriving
for the past 50 years. Though
nearly 80 years old, he still works four days a week, and if a customer
wants something done differently - better, faster, cheaper - Jack N.
Peck is the man to see. To
say his mind is innovative is a vast understatement.
As a boy, Mr. Peck had four things he wanted
to be: A fireman, a race
car driver, a tool and die maker and an airplane pilot.
If you count the go-carts he raced all around the country, he's
achieved all four. He has
survived a heart attack, double bypass surgery and a host of accidents;
his business has weathered five decades of economic ups and downs and
a devastating fire. "Persistence,"
Mr. Peck says, explaining his success.
Today he is most proud of his family, and
for them he saves his most precious wish:
"I hope they can find the same peace with God that I've
found." Jack Nestor
Peck was born April 11, 1919, in Nashville, Tenn.
His father John Nelson Peck, a native of Nashville, was a grinder
hand and ran a grinding machine.
His mother, Lucille Herbert, worked for a telephone company.
She had also driven a scrap truck for her father, who was in
the scrap business.
When Jack was six months old, his mother left
John Peck and returned to her native Rochester, N.Y., to be near her
family. Within a short
period of time, she and Jack moved with her family to Detroit, Michigan.
Jack's mother remarried when Jack was four and a half years old.
Her new husband, Ernest Alfred Richards, was always "Dad"
to Jack. Ernie Richards
was four years younger than Lucy.
He worked for the Power Company and the Phone Company around
that time. They had four
children together: Herbert
Ernest, Shirley Virginia, Phyllis and Carol Jean.
Jack grew up on the East Side of Detroit.
He went to an eight-grade elementary school called Keating and
to Foch Middle School for ninth grade.
He graduated from Southeastern High School in 1937.
Jack got his first job when he was nine years old.
He sacked potatoes and cleaned out a grocery store. "I got paid 10 cents a bag for sacking a 100-pound bag
of potatoes and probably a piece of bologna for cleaning the basement
out," he laughs. When
Jack got older he worked in several garages, on a grease rack and as
a mechanic.
This was during the Depression, which were
difficult times for his family.
"We lost our home, had a flood...but we enjoyed life,"
he said. His grandfather,
George Herbert, went bankrupt in the scrap business during that period.
Jack admits he was a mischievous child.
"I was always kind of in a bit of trouble," he grins.
"I was called Peck's bad boy.
It was little things; I cut down somebody's trees.
And when they dredged the canal, we pushed the stuff they dredged
out back in. I was about
seven or eight then. They
brought me home in a police car."
He was probably scared to death, he recalls, but "not as
much of the policeman as of my mother and dad."
Jack's run of accidents started early.
Once, as a child, he almost cut his tongue off when he fell down
the steps with a sucker stick in his mouth.
Another time he burned both feet on an underground fire.
"That was right after my mother remarried," he said.
"I didn't walk for about six months." Jack played
hockey and was a goalie on neighborhood teams.
"The six teams we formed wound up being the Southeastern
Michigan Amateur Hockey League." "I did a lot of canoeing,
and helped build a small sailboat," he says.
"We sailed it in the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair."
He often went camping, sometimes with his family and sometimes
just with groups of boys.
