A competitive spirit and persistence pays off for Seaside Fire Chief Mary Gutierrez.

There weren’t many women who worked as firefighters in the 1980s, but Mary Gutierrez was undeterred. She knew she wanted to become one, but had no idea how to go about it. Her years as a competitive athlete and bodybuilder taught her persistence and courage, so one day she picked up the phone and called her local fire station. She remembers saying, “‘I want to become a firefighter but I don’t know what to do. Can you help me?’” By sheer luck the man who answered the phone that day was coordinating the regional fire academy and was looking to recruit women. “He opened a door for me,” she says.

Gutierrez became one of the first four women hired as firefighters in the East Bay in 1989. She started at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory Fire Department, then became a paramedic in 1995 and went to work for the San Jose Fire Department. There she rose through the ranks over 20 years to become a battalion chief, then was hired by the Gilroy Fire Department where she became a division chief. She retired in January 2020, but not without a desire to become a fire chief. That opportunity came up last December when Seaside’s chief Brian Dempsey retired and Gutierrez was hired to take his place. She started the job on Jan. 4.

Gutierrez sat down with the Weekly recently to talk about her career, dealing with tragedy, mentoring others and finding more women to join her in the Seaside department where she’s the only female at the moment.

Weekly: What made you decide you wanted to become a firefighter?

Gutierrez: I had always aspired to become a firefighter because of my hurdle coach. She was an Olympic hurdler, she was a firefighter and a bodybuilder. So she became my mentor early and I did all those things. I was a hurdler as I ran track and field all through college. I became a bodybuilder for about 15 years, going to the USA [Bodybuilding Championships] and trying to qualify for Miss Olympiad. I said I wanted to be just like her. Back then it was about seeing something and having a mentor, and she was that to me.

Did you find being a firefighter challenging at first?

I had an athletic background my entire life, being competitive in all those sports – I’ve always looked for that competitive edge. Being competitive and challenged physically has always been a natural fit for me. For those that I mentor and have been mentoring the past 30 years – men, women of all shapes and sizes – I encourage them [in that] you have to be fit, you have to be strong, mentally and physically. Because you can be strong physically but if you’re not strong mentally it becomes a very difficult journey being a firefighter.

You’ve witnessed tragedy, including while managing department operations at the Gilroy Garlic Festival when a mass shooting happened on July 28, 2019. How do you deal with those experiences?

As firefighters we take an oath of office, we put up our right hand and we swear to protect and serve. Regardless of the situation we go in. [We go] through years of education, and classes in regards to post-traumatic stress.

We learn how to cope and we learn that maybe we’ll never be the same but we have tools for coping. We call it our backpack that we carry. We recognize when our backpack is full and we feel like we’re stumbling, and we learn to recognize it in each other so we can pick them up, talk with them, counsel them and find additional support for them. Part of my life’s mission in the fire service, and one of the most rewarding things I’ve done, is to help our own firefighters to heal our own.

As the only woman in the department you must be focused on recruitment all the time.

It’s one of the city’s priorities, it’s one of my priorities, to have diversified workforces, to ensure inclusivity and to remove barriers that may not be obvious. We’re going to have open firefighter recruitment in the next few months.

I recognize the importance of diversity and making this opportunity available to anybody who wants to do it and who is qualified to do it. I’ve always said it’s a well-kept secret of how much fun it is and how rewarding it is to be a firefighter. It’s another reason I still want to be on the frontlines, because if a young woman sees another woman in a position they’ve never seen before, they’ll recognize “I can do that.” What you see is what you can be, right?