PEOPLE OF INTEREST
ANTHONY INSWASTY
91
Always an artist at heart, Debra Terrio did not pursue her passion until she retired from working as a nurse practitioner.
BY ELLEN GILLETTE
As a little girl in Minnesota, Debra Fogarty Terrio longed
to be an artist, maybe an art teacher. She created
sculptures in the snow. She drew whenever she could.
Her mother, a sturdy Irish Catholic raising eight children on a
farm, wasn’t encouraging.
“She wanted her girls to be nurses, not teachers,” Terrio
says. “She thought we’d get married and pregnant and then
have to quit.”
In the 1950s, visibly pregnant women were often not
allowed to work around children.
“She felt we’d never get part-time work, either. Nurses could
work right up until they delivered and always find jobs.”
In time, Terrio found a way to incorporate her dreams with
reality.
Farm life held joys as well as challenges. Roaming virtually
unsupervised on 375 acres with her twin brother, little sister
and cousins was wonderful, but winter temperatures in Minnesota
can plummet to minus 20 degrees. She and her twin
started school at age 5.
“I think our mother wanted us out of the house — we
were a handful!”
Terrio helped in the fields and garden as well as with a
variety of livestock, on top of schoolwork and the everpresent
women’s chores: cooking, cleaning, canning.
When Terrio was 13, her father died and the farm was
sold. Her mother took a teaching job in town, with Terrio
taking over most of the household duties. Although she
worked as a lifeguard her junior year, a new manager
wouldn’t hire her back.
“He said women weren’t ‘strong enough.’ ”
After graduation, Terrio finished a two-year registered
nurse program, followed by a federal program to create more
healthcare opportunities for rural areas by training nurse
practitioners. Terrio was the only student in her class with a
two-year, rather than a four-year, degree but she maintained
a straight-A average.
Some doctors were not enthusiastic about the NP program,
believing that women wouldn’t be good candidates for the
>>
The REINVENTED ARTIST