“When push comes to shove, I always hope to choose the principle…” Debra Medina
on her leaving home at 18 and marrying Noe Medina. Chris Matthews implies Medina “racist” because of standing with the founders and the Constitutional principles of interposition and nullification as a way of pushing back against big government. If you think Medina is a racists: She left home to marry her childhood sweetheart Noe Medina at a time when Hispanics were required to have separate proms. She forsook her genetic family for the love of her life and principle. 30 years later she and her family’s attitudes have not changed and she is still married to Noe who is a fine man.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 12:40 a.m. Friday, Feb. 12, 2010
Published: 7:11 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010
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BEEVILLE — When Debra Parker was in high school in the late 1970s, her parents limited her to two after-school activities at A.C. Jones High School. Any more than that would have taken her away from the family ranch, where she spent early mornings and late evenings breaking horses, herding cattle and goats, butchering livestock and churning butter.
It was just outside this South Texas town, about an hour’s drive north of Corpus Christi, that Parker — now Debra Medina — picked up the skills of self-reliance that have characterized her politics as she runs for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. She left Beeville long ago, but the lessons of self-sufficiency have resonated with voters as she moved up the polls on a wave of anti-government fervor.
The Beeville of the 1970s was, in one major respect, a government town. Chase Field, a Navy aviation base where jet pilots practiced aircraft-carrier landings and takeoffs, was the largest employer in town.
But for Medina, 47 , much of her early life might as well have been spent on the prairie. The oldest of four children, Medina grew up in a small white house just outside town in the community of Orangedale. A walk-in cooler housed butchered meat; ducks and chickens waddled around the yard; and a large vegetable garden nourished the family.
“I exaggerate, but I like to say the only thing my mother bought was mayonaise, mustard and ketchup,” Medina says.
Just down the road, in the community of Friendship, her parents kept a small ranch, where they took care of livestock and baled hay.
“She’s as country as you can get,” her mother, Charlene Parker, says from behind the counter of the feed supply store she runs with her husband. “From when she was a little girl, her daddy taught her to shoot on itty bitty shotguns.”
(One of her two extracurriculars was Future Farmers of America; a 1980 yearbook photo in which she appears is titled “FFA Trains Tomorrow’s Leaders.”)
“They were very self-reliant people,” said Erwin Massengale, an old family friend who used to do work on the property. “Any amount of money they could save was money in their pocket.”
“They kind of lived off the land, and when she got home she had chores to do,” said Paul Jaure, who taught agriculture and was an adviser to the FFA club. “She had to be a very tough little gal, living in a good old country home.”
It was on the ranch, too, that she developed the self-assuredness that has served her well as she tries to distinguish herself from her better-known primary competitors, Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
“She was always outspoken on things,” said Bennie Belew, who taught her two courses of honors biology. “If she believed in something, or wanted to ask something, she was not afraid to do it.”
For a bright teenager in South Texas, living on an isolated ranch also meant bristling against a strain of provincialism.
She was “very smart, determined and hard-headed,” says her mother. “When she sets her mind to something, she pretty well makes the decision and sticks with it.”
By hard-headed, her mother meant her daughter’s leaving home, which was tied up with her relationship with Noe Medina, whom she began dating in 1980 after meeting him at work at a grocery store.
Noe Medina was “one of the finest students I’ve taught,” Belew said. “He was an excellent student, and a very nice kid and top of the class.”
But he was Mexican-American; her parents forbade the relationship; she left home. (At the time, said Belew, A.C. Jones High School still had separate proms for Hispanics and whites.)
Two weeks after she graduated from Bee County Community College in 1982, she and Medina married, and she has basically been estranged from her parents since, she said.
“It is purely racial,” Debra Medina said. “At the age of 18, as difficult as it was, I didn’t know then that 30 years later they would maintain that position. When push comes to shove, I always hope to choose the principle, and even when my parents said no, I knew they were wrong.”
Her mother, who said she heard her daughter was running for governor through a radio host in Beeville, has spoken with Medina about the race; Medina doesn’t speak with her father.
“She left home when she was 18,” said Charlene Parker, who wears a Medina pin and hands out Medina campaign literature and stickers. “Everything else she accomplished, she did after she left here.”
In her mid-20s, Debra Medina spent her weekdays in San Antonio, where she was certified as a registered nurse at Southwest Baptist Hospital School of Nursing. She was so busy with nursing and starting a family that a husband of a fellow nurse once joked that she should “take two Valium so you experience life like the rest of us,” she remembers.
The Medinas have a daughter, Janise Cookston, 25, who lives in Houston and got a degree from Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., and a son, Jacob, 20, a junior at Texas A&M University. Both of them were home-schooled.
The family moved to Wharton in 1989 after Debra Medina was recruited to be the director of a nursing home. Then, from 1994 to 2002, she commuted to Houston, taking medical consulting jobs as she got a degree in business from LeTourneau University, an evangelical Christian school.
In 2002, she opened Prudentia, a small medical-billing and consulting company at which her husband also works, in Wharton. That work has been put on hold over the past year as she’s traveled the state to promote her candidacy.
Beeville, meanwhile, has become a different kind of government town. In the early 1990s, Chase Field was shut down by Washington as part of a post-Cold War base realignment, and its grounds became home to three prisons, including the maximum security McConnell Unit. Navy families left, and families of prisoners took their place.
The problems she faces gaining exposure are thrown into relief here: Despite being a native daughter, few Medina campaign signs can be found around town.
But she still has her supporters who knew her as a teen and who have tuned in to the GOP debates that have won her statewide attention.
“I was not surprised with her performance,” said Massengale, the old family friend. “She has always had her facts down.”
asherprice@statesman.com; 445-3643
