[2] His father was a railway mail clerk and wrote for the Twin Cities Herald, and his mother was a school teacher.

After one year of college, in 1942 Peery joined the Army Air Force, in which he served from 1942 until 1945, participating in campaigns in Italy and North Africa.

[2] Peery then attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received a master's degree in physics in 1955.

[3] Some of his fellow students at Michigan included Edward Spiegel, Martha Hazen, Arthur Upgren and Lowell Doherty.

[1] In 1959, while still completing his doctorate, Peery began teaching at Indiana University, and accepted a position there as assistant professor of astronomy in 1962.

[5] In 1977, he left Indiana for a position at Howard University, where he had been recruited to start an astrophysics graduate program.

[7] While at Howard, he also took two years' leave at the National Science Foundation to serve as its program director for the astronomy division.

He also conducted research at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and was a visiting professor at Harvard University, the California Institute of Technology and the College of William and Mary.