Kreg George Kinzle

Interment: Friday, October 13, 2023, 1:00 P.M., Glenwood Cemetery, Glenwood, Iowa. The family will be present 12:00 P.M. at Peterson Mortuary.

Services: Friday, October 13, 2023, 4:00 P.M., Westside Church, 15050 West Dodge Road, Omaha, Nebraska. Dinner following the service in “The Big Room” – All are welcome.

Westside Church Livestream Link: https://www.youtube.com/@WestsideChurchOmaha

Memorial donations may be directed to: Mills County Conservation, 56235 Deacon Rd., Pacific Junction, Iowa or Westside Church, 15050 W. Dodge Road, Omaha, Nebraska.

Please have flower arrangements sent to Westside Church.

Autobiography: Kreg George Kinzle

I was born in Denison, Iowa, just ninety-two miles north-northeast of Glenwood. My grandfather was a mason and a contractor who built many of the buildings in downtown Denison. Growing up my family lived in the basement dwelling of his apartment building located on Broadway between the Maxwell and Huebner funeral homes.  My father was on the city council and owned a clothing store where he worked with my grandmother and my mother.  I was a shy child and teenager in a family with strong values and work ethics.  When I was fourteen, I mowed lawns and shoveled snow to earn money to buy my first shotgun so that I could pursue my lifelong hobby of upland bird hunting.  At sixteen I went to work at the Phillip’s Sixty-Six service station pumping gas, cleaning windshields, fixing flat tires, and washing cars.  I worked there throughout my high school years, starting at ninety-cents-an-hour and working up to a dollar-and-a-quarter by my senior summer.  I saved most of my income for college but used some money to buy a Yamaha motorcycle.  But my cycling days were few, within two weeks of purchase I “T-boned” a Buick that pulled out in front of me on Highway 30 … and I ended up in the hospital with broken bones and a severe concussion.  (Ouch!  I should have listened to my mother.)

After high school graduation I attended the University of Iowa on a Merit Scholarship.  It was a turbulent time with the Vietnam War protests and so my sophomore year I transferred to Sioux Falls College, a Baptist school, from which I graduated with an English degree.  During this time I also worked at Nash Finch Warehouse filling orders for grocery stores and worked weekends tending bar at Southgate Lounge.  And I worked two summers in Des Moines, Iowa, at Des Moines Steel Company putting up chain-link fence and building gates, and at Pittsburg-Des Moines Steel company manufacturing water towers.  After college graduation I took a three-week trip to southern Mexico with my art professor and six of his students.  We went to the Pyramid of the Sun, the bull fights, a soccer game in Aztec Stadium, and the Museum of Modern Mexican Art in Mexico City, and we drove 6,000 kilometers in a rented Volkswagen van around the south of the country from the Pacific to Atlantic oceans studying the indigenous art.  After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, I enrolled at Augustana College in Sioux Falls and earned my teaching certification.  I performed my student teaching at Lincoln High School in Sioux Falls.

Following my college years, I was offered a position as Eighth Grade Reading Instructor at Glenwood Middle School by the Glenwood superintendent … who was my former junior high school principal!  (It pays to behave in school.)  I held that very same job for the next thirty-six years!  In today’s world that kind of job loyalty is probably a thing of the past?  I also worked summers … four of them as a Lake Patrol Officer at Big Creek and Saylorville lakes for the Iowa Conservation Commission (now the Iowa DNR) and six summers after that for the JTPA Summer Youth Program placing and supervising disadvantaged and handicapped teens in a summer jobs program.  And I worked on the United States Pre-Census in 1980, going door-to-door verifying census information for accuracy. 

Six years after moving to Glenwood I married Janiece Kae Walk on Valentine’s Day of 1981.  I met her one summer in Polk City, Iowa, where I was working Lake Patrol.  We spent most of my days-off that summer (only Fridays) sailing on Big Creek Lake on my small Sailfish sailboat.  After we married, we bought a little white house on Locust Street (where we still live today) and raised two sons, Lance and Brandt.  Our basement rec-room was the boyhood hangout for them and all of their friends throughout middle school and high school.  They watched a lot of movies and played a lot of videogames.  (It was nice to almost always know where they were!)  Janiece taught art and I taught reading and writing.  We also taught Sunday School and I served for nine years as a deacon in the First Baptist Church. We are now members of the Westside Church in Omaha, Nebraska.  I was also a past member of the Optimist Club and the Southwest Iowa Sportsman’s Club and served for several years on the Pheasants Forever Banquet Committee.  I instructed the fishing class at GMS Outdoor Ed Day each year and took quite a few kids fishing and hunting.  Now I serve on the Mills County Conservation Board.  During the ten years that I have been a board member we have built the new Pony Creek Nature Center, added thirty adjacent acres to Pony Creek Park, put two canoe accesses on the Nishnabotna River, built two beautiful rental cabins at the park, and are constructing a new workshop.  It has been fun to be a part of all the amazing progress. 

I have been retired from teaching now for over ten years.  Teaching was a wonderful occupation, I loved it, but retirement is also great.  I fish several times a week year-around, plus still do a little bird hunting.  In between I play pickleball to stay in shape and to have fun.  Remember, if you rest you rust!

Kreg was preceded in passing by his parents. Survivors include his wife Janiece Kinzle of Glenwood, Iowa; sons Lance (Aliya) Kinzle of Shawnee, Kansas; Brandt Kinzle of Denver, Colorado; grandchildren Hunter Kinzle-Gorman and Isaac Kinzle; sister Carol (Joe) Dowdey of Littleton, Colorado; extended relatives and many friends.