Debby Moorhead moved to Manteca for the same reason many people do today — affordable housing.

It was 1986. Moorhead and husband Brad were living in San Jose and wanted to buy a home instead of continuing to rent. Everything they looked at in San Jose and nearby that they could afford needed major work. Brad, who was working as a brick mason at the time, had done a job in Manteca and took notice of the housing and prices.

“Brad asked me what I thought about moving to Manteca,” Moorhead recalled. “We’d been to the waterslides before so I knew a little bit about Manteca. We used to go to Pine Mountain Lake and had to take (old Highway 120) Yosemite Avenue through Manteca. It was a small town then. Monkey’s (a service station at Airport Way and Yosemite) used to have someone in a gorilla suit out front to (attract customers).”

Today Moorhead is the longest serving member of the Manteca City Council as she has started her 11th year in office. When she’s not tending to city business she is working caring for people who have various needs that are still living at home through Visiting Angels. It’s an extension of her long-career of caring for people in everything from retirement and assisted living situations to hospice.

She is only the fifth woman in Manteca’s 100-year history to get elected to the City Council. Moorhead also is playing a key role in expanding passenger rail commuter service to the Northern San Joaquin Valley via ACE and Valley Link thanks to her appointment by the San Joaquin Council of Governments to the San Joaquin Rail Commission.

Working with Manteca

families built lasting

contacts over the years

Her accession to elected office involved what Moorhead called “knocking on a gazillion doors” but her core support was strong connections she had developed with countless Manteca families during the five years she spent as a San Joaquin Hospice volunteer and her subsequent career working in assisted living facilities and retirement homes.

Moorhead’s time as a hospice volunteer started in 1991. Volunteers would meet monthly at Doctors Hospital of Manteca where they would receive ongoing training and supervision from Marilyn Knight. She was initially paired with Terri Palmer who had experience as a volunteer. Each volunteer was given a list of families to help. Palmer and Moorhead worked as a team until Moorhead was ready to serve families on her own.

“You got to know the entire family,” Moorhead said of hospice.

She promised herself that she’d devote time to hospice when her son got older given how the organization was such a great help when her father who was living in Merced was stricken with cancer and was nearing death.

Moorhead remembered one meeting at Doctors Hospital where there were two terminal patients whose families had requested help. Both patients were young children.

“No one wanted to take them because they had young children and feared it would be too hard on them,” Moorhead recalled. “I thought that if my son was in that situation that I’d appreciate someone being there.”

Moorhead ended up taking one of the patients — an 8-year-old boy with leukemia whose family lived on Elm Street.

After working with the family for a while, she got a call at 1 a.m. from the distraught mother who asked if she could come over.

“I can’t think of it without getting emotional,” Moorhead said of that visit.

The boy was upset because his mother explained to him that “Jesus gave you to me and now you are going to go back to Jesus.”

“He asked me, ‘What if Jesus doesn’t want to take me back?’” Moorhead recalled the 8-year-old saying.

After assuring him that Jesus would take him back, the boy asked what if he didn’t and what would happen if he needed to take a cab to get back home because he didn’t have any money.

Moorhead said she pulled out a five dollar bill and told the boy that he could use the money for a cab if needed. The boy got his wallet and tucked the five dollar bill inside.

He then asked what if Jesus sent him back to his mother and she wasn’t home. Moorhead said she’d make sure he had a house key. Then, after thinking for a second, the boy thought maybe it would be better instead of being at home alone if that happened to go to the nearby Boys & Girls Club where he was a member.

Moorhead said the 8-year-old — even though he had lost all of his hair in chemotherapy — also was worried that he might need to comb his hair for his mother should he be sent back so Moorhead made sure he had a comb.

Often they’d be called on so primary caregivers could have a respite. In one case a young wife’s husband was dying of cancer. They had three young kids — ages 5, 3 and 2.

While being there to look after her husband so she could get out of the house, she noticed there were 14 loads of laundry in the garage that needed done. She did them.

“You do whatever you can do to help — clean, cook, and such,” Moorhead said.

The hospice volunteers are there when the patients pass away. They contact the funeral home and help with the arrangements.

From hospice volunteer

to working as a CNA

After that she took training to become a certified nursing assistant and worked at Sun Bridge today known as Manteca Care & Rehabilitation while continuing her education. That allowed her to become an activities director at Palm Haven Convalescent Hospital on North Street. Moorhead worked there for two years while obtaining education to become a residential care facility for the elderly administrator. She was hired by Leisure Manor (now Brookdale) on Union Road in 1999 as the facility manager and served in that role for five years. She was credited with turning the facility around as well as stepping up workplace morale to the point what had been constant turnover became non-existent.

Moorhead was born in Omaha, Nebraska to the son of Italian immigrants. Her father was one of the four of seven siblings that were born in the United States after their parents emigrated from Sicily. Her grandfather was able to immigrate based on the strength of him having served with the United States military during World War II.

He ended up in Nebraska due to the number of jobs Union Pacific Railroad had available. Moorhead said Omaha had a large “Little Italy” community. It is where her father met her mother, an Irish American.

Her family moved to Twenty-nine Palms in Southern California where her father worked as an electrician before moving back to Omaha for three years. They were lured to San Jose in 1965 by plentiful jobs.

Moorhead attended Leland High in San Jose her freshmen year. She was moved to Braham High as a sophomore when that campus first opened.

A relative who worked as a beautician inspired her choice of post-secondary education — a cosmetology school.

“That is when I got my one and only trophy,” Moorhead said.

She had just over 200 hours of class time and was not yet “on the floor” where students worked on the hair of the school’s customers when she was entered as a contestant in the West Coast Show.

Each contestant was given a model that they had never met and had to come up with a unique hairstyle that complemented the model and execute it.

One of the judges that decided Moorhead was worthy of a trophy was Vidal Sasson himself — the British American hairstylist that founded the company that carries his name.

Moorhead worked six years as a hairstylist until she got pregnant.

“I wanted to be at home to raise our son Bradley,” Moorhead said.

She always volunteered as a room mother including when he enrolled in Yosemite School after moving to Manteca. Bradley was part of the first eighth grade graduating class of 38 students at Stella Brockman School. He also graduated from Manteca High where Moorhead was among the parents who not only attended her son’s activities and school events but also was a faithful volunteer.

Moorhead has served on a number of boards including Doctors Hospital, Worknet employer advisory, and the Stockton Airport advisory committee. She also was a Manteca Chamber of Commerce ambassador. That was before she was tapped to serve as the chamber’s executive director, a position she held for 10 years.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com