Debbie Petty is comfortable wearing various labels: Mom, wife,
caregiver, and once upon a time renegade athlete extraordinaire,
perhaps. But one label certainly would never fit her: Mundane.
Petty was born in San Jose but spent most of her childhood in
Gilroy, raised in a family of butchers.
Debbie Petty is comfortable wearing various labels: Mom, wife, caregiver, and once upon a time renegade athlete extraordinaire, perhaps. But one label certainly would never fit her: Mundane.
Petty was born in San Jose but spent most of her childhood in Gilroy, raised in a family of butchers.
“My dad was a butcher since he was 12 years old,” she said. “And he opened his own business with my godfather. The men would cut the meat, and the wives and sometimes the kids would wrap it in the next room. This was when you actually went to a bakery for bread and a butcher for steak, before supermarkets got big in the 70s.”
Growing up, Petty’s parents encouraged their children to be active, keeping their kids involved in sports and 4H Club.
“If we weren’t playing sports, we were getting more animals,” she said. “In high school I was playing volleyball, and track. The football coach would kick me out of the weight room so his players could train. So I told him I would just join the team.”
That summer, Petty trained hard with her sister for tryouts, running miles at a time and getting into what she considers the best shape of her life. Come fall, the head coach was not able to refuse her a place on the team – her threats to hire a lawyer and sue didn’t hurt either. Petty earned the right tackle position on Gilroy High’s JV team.
“The coach was a chauvinist, he hated having me on the team,” she said. “But most of the other guys playing were secure enough so that they didn’t mind. We all got along pretty well. But I don’t know what that coach was thinking, telling a 16-year-old girl what she can and can’t do.”
After high school, Petty was unsure about what she wanted to do with her life – like so many graduates – and took on a series of slightly less than glamorous jobs, such as a Home Run Pie delivery girl.
“Ten dollars an hour sounded like great money when I was 19,” she said. “At least, until the truck started to break down and my boss wanted me to deliver pies to the prison in Soledad.”
Petty then went back to her roots, working as a butcher in a grocery store, but her grandfather’s severe respiratory illness made her rethink her direction in life.
“He was on life support for a long time,” she said. “And as he started to get better, I realized it wasn’t the doctors who were really helping him get off the machine, but the respiratory therapists. They gave my dad another long, productive year of life.”
Petty went to school to become a registered respiratory therapist in the early 90s. She works at Kaiser Santa Theresa in San Jose, where she also mentors students learning her trade.
“It’s great, because I get to help mold the future of the field,” she said. “I also get to help give people their grandmas and grandpas back.”
In 1994, Petty met a strapping young buck named Lynne at a country western bar called the Saddle Rack in San Jose.
“I was just there to be the designated driver for my friends,” she said. ” I had just thrown on a ratty old tee-shirt and had no interest in finding a date. I guess you find what you really want right after you stop looking.”
When he finally proposed, Debbie was a bit skeptical. She suggested he sleep on it, and try again in the morning, which he did and she accepted. But after she went over two years with no ring and no set date for the wedding, she decided to take matters into her own hands. Petty enlisted the help of KSJO DJs Lamont and Tonelli in demanding a rock and a wedding date, on the air. Lynne made a joke about offering her a ring made of Cheerios, but the two eloped soon after, in 1996.
Today, the couple enjoy hunting and fishing and have added a new passion to the list: Harley Davidson motorcycles. Debbie and Lynne have two children, six-year-old Jarred and two-year-old Morgan.
“Motherhood is more amazing than I ever thought it would be, and a lot more challenging too,” said Petty. “But I really look forward to raising both of them, and growing old with my husband.”
