Terry Miller: From Steeltown to Milton
Like so many people who end up retiring to Milton, Terry Miller ended up there as very much a happy accident.
Her sister-in-law had been a frequent visitor to Rehoboth Beach and ended up retiring there in 2016. Miller and her wife, Mary Ellen, had visited, and were pondering the next stage of life as both of them were close to retiring themselves.
“I’ve always been a beach person,” Miller said. “My sister-in-law said, ‘Oh, for crying out loud, the two of you just need to retire so you can come down here and we can take care of each other.’”
That comment put the bug in Miller’s ear, but it wasn’t until another visit that they decided to look around a bit. After deeming Lewes and Rehoboth too expensive, a friend suggested they look at Milton.
“We came in on Federal Street and went down the main drag and we thought, ‘This is Mayberry.’ Who doesn’t want to live in Mayberry? I expected to see Opie over at Wagamons Pond,” she said. “We thought, ‘Oh my god, is this place for real?’ We just fell in love with the charm of it. We were just smitten from the front door.”
They drove back to their hometown of Pittsburgh and couldn’t shake the thought of moving to coastal Delaware. In 2018, they decided to make a go of it, and moved down to Milton.
For Miller, coming to the coast was a long way from her life in Pittsburgh, where she had a hard upbringing that later inspired her own memoir, “Behind God’s Back.”
“I’m a city rat,” she said. “My childhood was just as gritty as the air was.”
Miller was born in 1950s Pittsburgh in public housing. Her father abandoned the family from the beginning and her mother struggled with alcoholism. Miller learned to be the caretaker of the family, which included her brother, very early. They struggled with food insecurity. Despite the hardships and the smoky air of a steel mill town, Miller recalled that neighbors were helpful and looked out for one another.
The stress of her upbringing led Miller to take after her mother and turn to substance abuse as she reached her 20s. Not liking the person she had become, Miller decided to get sober, which she has maintained for 42 years now.
Miller’s professional background came in community organizing and social work. In 1991, she helped co-found the Pennsylvania Organization for Women in Early Recovery, or POWER, a drug intake program for women. Miller said she wanted to create an organization that was dedicated to women’s recovery journeys. POWER has grown to include outpatient and community-based services to support and mentor women in recovery.
Miller left POWER in 1993 for her first happy accident: landing as the director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics. The institute was founded by Dr. Moe Coleman, a mentor of Miller’s. After she decided to leave POWER, she talked with Coleman about what she wanted to do next. Very quickly, he asked her to join him at Pitt.
“We served as a neutral place for elected officials – at all levels of government – Democrats, Republicans, community and civic leaders, labor, business, nonprofit executives. We served as a neutral convener to bring all these people together to have civil discourse about all the critical policy issues that were affecting our community,” Miller said.
The institute would bring together subject matter experts, citizens and politicians to help draft legislation that could be introduced and passed at the state House in Harrisburg.
“We brokered difficult conversations,” Miller said. “We helped advance the region in a lot of ways.”
The idea of writing her own memoir came in 2004, and she worked on it off and on until 2016, when she was encouraged to hire an editor and get serious about it. She completed the book and had it published in 2021 after she moved to Delaware, in part thanks to a grant she was awarded by the Delaware Division of the Arts.
Miller describes the book much as she describes her life: a rough beginning but with a very safe landing at the end. She said there are moments when she and her wife sit out on their porch with a cup of coffee and can’t believe this is their life. While Miller does not have children of her own, Mary Ellen has three, and they now have four grandchildren.
“A big message for me is that we’re worthy of the work. The work is hard,” she said. “I’m learning how to be in a family with all the joy and love and laughter and messiness and hardship; to have this experience where I am a part of this clan. From my experiences as a child of being invisible to really being part of the family, it’s mind-blowing to me. I could have never dreamed this.”
