Longtime team roper and horse-trailer guru George “Pete” Zanetti passed away on July 30, 2025. He was 86.
Pete was born in Victorville, Calif., to Anthony and Pearl Zanetti and grew up working in their donut shop, the Desert Maid Bakery. He began riding horses at a very young age with his father, picking up a rope when he was 9 years old and only putting it down a few years ago.
Zanetti purchased his RCA card in 1958, when pro-rodeo memberships cost just $25. He hit the rodeo trail out of California in the 1960s and made the most of those calf-roping runs on a grandson of Driftwood that he rode for 18 years. Even when Zanetti was drafted into the Army in 1962-63, he was based at a missile defense station where his commanding officers would let him off to borrow a horse and rope at the few pro rodeos in New England.
When he’d gotten drafted, he’d dropped off his horses at Jack Roddy’s place to sell, and noticed a two-horse aluminum trailer out in the middle of a pasture. Prior to World War II, horses were typically transported in the back of a truck. Zanetti traded a horse for that 1955 single-axle, open-top trailer, then put tires on it and a tarp across the top and used it to move to Baltimore.
That launched his opening of Pete Zanetti Trailers in 1979 in Apple Valley, Calif. With the help of his family, Pete built more than 270 custom aluminum horse trailers – everything from a single-axle one-horse to a triple-horse straight-ahead in six-horse and eight-horse versions. Today, they are collector’s items. Rumor has it that a Pete Zanetti-built aluminum horse trailer in the Phoenix area has more than 6 million miles on it. And the late Joe Kirk Fulton of Lubbock, Texas – the AQHA Hall-of-Famer who bred Peppy San Badger – had three Zanetti six-horse trailers that each had been pulled more than 4 million miles.
Building trailers was a hard-scrabble life that Zanetti supplemented by tying calves at rodeos, where some friends of his were Hollywood stunt men. So, Zanetti also filmed a few commercials, which he once described as “a kick in the butt.” One ad for Busch beer aired for 17 years.
After raising two boys and living 58 years in the Napa Valley area, Pete moved with his wife, Jan Zanetti, to Weatherford, Texas in 1997 to start Zanetti Trailer Repair. Because Pete knew what it was like to blow an inside dually tire leaving a rodeo, his policy at Zanetti’s was for his staff to always stop what they were doing to fix a rodeo guy or gal up and get them back on the road.
Five or six years after borrowing $2,500 from a friend to put parts on the shelves, Zanetti’s Trailer Repair, thanks to family members and devoted employees, was doing more than a million dollars a year in business. Pete also never quit heeling steers and competed at the WSTR Finale in Las Vegas several times. He and Jan finally retired and closed the doors of their shop in late 2021.
Pete was preceded in death by his youngest son, Tony Zanetti, in 2005. He is survived by his wife Jan, his son Lee, three stepchildren, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
—TRJ—
