Mt. Madonna’s Pete Garcia is battling cancer, but the veteran
doesn’t plan on retiring soon
Gilroy – The elderly man with the shock of sliver-white hair presses a whistle between his lips and blows.
“Come on guys, let’s go,” he yells with authority, ushering stragglers into their classrooms.
Within minutes, the Mt. Madonna High School students have all filed into the appropriate rooms and once again the 78-year-old has successfully executed one of his daily tasks with the humor and respect students and staff have come to expect of the longtime Gilroyan.
“You’ve got to treat these kids with a lot of compassion,” Pete Garcia said. “I don’t holler at them with anger or hate, I do it with compassion.”
Since, 1999 the World War II veteran has been a staple at the continuation high school. Step foot onto the campus and most likely the first person to cross your path will be Garcia. Sure his official title is campus supervisor but at Mt. Madonna, he’s viewed as so much more.
“They (students) know Pete as the yard supervisor but he’s their friend as well,” said Joanne Carollo, a Mt. Madonna U.S. history and English teacher. “It’s not like they just see him as an authority figure. … He’s always positive about the staff and the school and I think that rubs off.”
When Garcia’s absent, he’s missed, Carollo said. And after being diagnosed with prostate cancer his absences have became more common. Whenever he calls in sick, students pepper Carollo with questions, wondering if he’s OK and how his treatments are going.
One recent warm morning, as Garcia sat in the shaded lunch area, students randomly approached the supervisor, greeting him with hand shakes and kind words.
Garcia was born in Bakersfield, the oldest of three boys. In high school, he enlisted in the Army and was quickly sent to the South Pacific to fight in World War II. Garcia and both his brothers also fought in the Korean War.
Two of the boys returned home alive, but his brother Joe died in battle, killed not long after landing in the foreign land. He was just a kid, about 18 years old. Still a young man himself, after his brother’s death, Garcia changed immensely.
“I had a good life when I was in the service but after they killed my brother, it was different,” he said. “We were so close, I loved him so much. Then my little brother went and I said ‘Don’t try to be a hero.'”
“The one who took it very hard was my mother. She used to say ‘Take care of your brother, you only have one brother left now.’ When you lose someone in your family it really hurts.”
Garcia spent a large chunk of his life in the Army. Wounded twice, he received a Purple Heart.
He even attempted to join troops in Vietnam and lied about his age to do so. It didn’t take long for officials to discover the truth and send him back home.
After leaving the service, Garcia returned to Bakersfield but decided the family farm was not for him. He had always liked San Jose – having partied there while living at Fort Ord and Camp Roberts – so he decided to head north.
In Gilroy, at a dance he met his wife Lita, who was working at the Cannery at the time and they’ve been married for 38 years. Although Garcia claims he wasn’t a good dancer, things worked out.
The couple had one child, a daughter who lives in Gilroy and gave them three grandchildren. Garcia became involved with the school district when his family moved to Gilroy. In San Jose he’d worked as an assistant chef at a German restaurant, so when they moved he wasn’t sure what career path to take.
A family member recommended him for a position, any position, at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill. The principal decided that Garcia’s military background made him the perfect candidate for campus supervisor and hired him.
Garcia spent 15 years at Live Oak before retiring from full-time work in the early 1990s. Before landing his current job at Mt. Madonna he jumped around to various Gilroy elementary schools, serving as yard duty.
At El Roble Elementary School he met Mary Ann Puente and ended up convincing her to take a job as an administrative assistant at the continuation school.
“Pete is a big part of why I’m here,” she said. “He brings spirit to the school and he really has good rapport with the students.”
Sergio Montenegro, the fifth Mt. Madonna principal Garcia has worked with during seven-year tenure, has the utmost respect for his campus supervisor.
“He provides students with a reason to change and believes in them to the point where they begin to believe in themselves,” he said. “He has that great fatherhood balance where he loves them and disciplines them.”
The longtime employee also has a wicked sense of humor and although the doctor keeps telling him he has cancer, Garcia doesn’t believe it. And what about those rumors that he plans to retire? Don’t even think about it.
“I tell them they’ll have to kill me before I retire,” he said with his telltale laugh.
