Pettis, Shirley Neil, 1924-2016

Shirley Neil Pettis (July 12, 1924 – December 30, 2016) was an American businesswoman and politician. A member of the Republican Party, she served as a U.S. Representative from California between 1975 and 1979. She was first elected to fill the seat after her husband, Jerry Pettis, died in office.

Born Shirley Neil McCumber on July 12, 1924 in Mountain View, California, Pettis attended elementary schools in Berkeley, California from 1931 to 1932, and Berrien Springs, Michigan from 1933 to 1937. She graduated from Andrews Academy in 1942. She attended Andrews University from 1942 to 1943, and the University of California, Berkeley from 1944 to 1945. After the death of her first husband, Dr. John McNulty, in World War II, she married Jerry Pettis, a World War II flight instructor who would go on to become a self-made millionaire and a professor of economics at Loma Linda University. Along with her husband, Shirley Pettis was a founder and manager of the Audio Digest Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of the California Medical Association which placed abstracts of medical journals and lectures on audiocassette tapes. The couple also owned Magnetic Tape Duplicators. In addition, Pettis assisted her husband in the operation of their southern California ranch and, when he was elected to Congress, wrote a regular newspaper column for the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram.

After her husband's February 1975 death in an airplane crash, Shirley Pettis ran in the special election to succeed him, winning more than 60 percent of the vote against a field of 12 other candidates in the April 29, 1975, special election to fill his seat. During her first term in the House, Pettis used her seat on Interior and Insular Affairs to advance legislation protecting desert lands in her district. She secured wilderness status for nearly half a million acres in the Joshua Tree National Monument. She also worked to have the California desert established as a conservation area. On nonenvironmental issues during her two terms, she voted with her GOP colleagues to oppose federal funding for abortions and the creation of a federal consumer rights agency, and she proposed cuts to America’s military and economic assistance to South Korea. As a Representative with 16 Native American tribes in her district, Pettis remained a consistent advocate of legislation aimed at improving the health and welfare of Native Americans.

Citing difficulty with keeping in touch with her constituents from the sprawling 27,000-square-mile California district, Pettis declined to run for renomination in 1978. From 1980 to 1981, she served as vice president of the Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington, DC. Following that, Pettis was a member of the Arms Control and Disarmament Commission for two years. President George H. W. Bush appointed her to the Commission on Presidential Scholars, where she served from 1990 to 1992. In 1979 Pettis also began a long term of service on the board of directors of a major insurance company. She married Ben Roberson in February 1988. At the age of 92, Shirley Pettis died on December 30, 2016, in Rancho Mirage, California.