Vermonters have been leaving Vermont for almost as long as non-natives have been staking claims. For almost two hundred years, Vermonters have been lamenting the exodus of their citizens, particularly its youth. But not all young Vermonters who go away stay away.
“Growing up, I always knew there was somewhere else to live, and I just wanted out of here,” says Betsy Walker Miller, who grew up in South Londonderry, attended Flood Brook Elementary School, and graduated from Leland and Gray Union High School in 1977. “And I went.”
In 1983, after five years selling real estate in Bondville, Miller had a chance.
A second-home owner who served as the medical director at Squibb Pharmaceuticals offered her a job in New York City. Miller took it. She phoned all her real estate clients from New York for help finding an apartment, and within a month was living in Manhattan. She loved it.
In time, she moved across the Hudson, to Ridgewood, N.J., an easy commute into Manhattan - as long as she was single and without children. But Betsy met and married Mark Miller, a New Jersey native, and soon they had their first child. She had to hire a nanny to care for her daughter when her maternity leave ended, and the 12-hour workday that started and ended on a bus began to lose its allure. “I wanted to raise my child,” she said.
Meanwhile, Squibb was bought out two times over, and the company moved to Princeton, N.J, just before Miller gave birth to her second child. “It would have meant a two-hour commute each way, by car,” she explained. “We would have had to relocate. When my maternity leave ended, I took my severance pay, and we came back to Vermont.”
Miller returned to Vermont in 1993, ten years after she left, bringing her husband and two children with her. Mark, a builder, commuted while he finished some projects, then hired himself out to local contractors until he could establish his own business here.
“Mark's a foreigner,” Miller says. “The first time I brought him to Vermont, in 1988, he couldn't believe how rural it was. But he loves it here. It's his kind of living, and he's met a lot of people through his work.”
Unquestionably, the move has been all about lifestyle. “Things are more expensive here, and everything is so far away,” Miller says, “but it's easier to entertain yourself for free. In New Jersey, you couldn't avoid spending money, the proximity to shopping, the extravagant birthday parties for one-year-olds. I wasn't raised that way.”
“There's a quality of life here that's better than all the shopping in the world,” says Miller, listing off the benefits: “bike riding in the Jamaica State Park after dinner with the kids, great views, a small school, camaraderie with other parents, no 'keeping up with the Joneses'.”
Miller also likes that she doesn't have to maintain a career to maintain a lifestyle in Vermont. When she first moved back, she stayed home with her two children and provided child care in her home to others. Now she works at Grace Cottage Hospital, in Townshend, processing accounts receivable. Her daughter will graduate from Leland and Gray this year and attend a four-year college; she is encouraging her son to do the same.
Miller realizes that her children might not come back to live in Vermont. “Even though there are so many people in New York, it could get lonely,” she remembers. “In Ridgewood, not many people had family. I wanted my kids to know their grandparents. I had a lot of support from my mother and sisters when my kids were small.”
As much as she loves living in Vermont, Miller can imagine relocating. “If the kids don't come back here, I'd move to be near them.”
A house with a deck and a yard, and a dog
When Drew Richards left Vermont for Williams College, he had no intention of ever coming back. The summer before his senior year, Richards, a 1995 graduate of Brattleboro Union High School (BUHS) served an internship at an investment bank in Manhattan and loved it; he returned to Wall Street after graduating. From 1999 to 2001, Richards was an investment analyst for Citigroup, commuting daily from his apartment on the Upper West Side down to the financial district. He had just emerged from the subway on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when he witnessed the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
Less than a year later, Richards was working in a private equity firm in Boston. The only hitch: Tammy, the girlfriend who would later become his wife, was still in New York.
Two years of long-distance romance was enough. Both gave up their urban apartments for a small house in northern New Hampshire, near Hanover, where Richards enrolled in Dartmouth's Tuck Business School to pursue an MBA. When he started out, Richards was certain that he would pursue his interest in private equity banking. But there are no internships in the world of private equity, and he had already worked in the field. “I already knew where I'd fit in the investment world,” he explains.
Indeed, unlike most of the other MBA candidates in the program, Drew Richards already had several years of experience in high finance. He wanted to try something different, so he took a summer job at The Richards Group, his family's insurance business.
“My older brother and cousin were already working there,” Richards says. “I wanted to find out if it would be a good fit for me.”
It was.
One of the things that helped shape Richards' change of plans was reconnecting with the outdoors and rural life. He had been on the U.S. ski team for ski jumping in high school, spending the fall and spring terms at BUHS and attending the National Sports Academy in Lake Placid, N.Y., every winter. Back in rural New England, he reconnected with skiing, soccer, golf, and the out-of-doors.
Midway through his MBA, Drew and Tammy married. “We had a house with a deck and a yard. We got a dog. I wasn't willing to squeeze back into an apartment,” Richards says.
“But it wasn't just the lifestyle,” he explains. “That wouldn't have been enough. The professional piece is fantastic.” Richards started to learn the business, and with his brother and cousin, has set out to expand the family's original agency, which now offers group benefits and financial services as well as home and car insurance. Richards finds the work both challenging and professionally satisfying.
Richards confesses that there's not the density of young professionals he and Tammy would befriend in a larger city, such as Portsmouth, N.H., or Portland, Maine. “But,” he says, “it's easy to become part of a community here.” He serves on the boards of the Brattleboro Chamber of Commerce, the Windham Housing Trust, and the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation, and he is a member of the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital corporation.
Even though his professional and community work keep him busy, it doesn't rule his life as it did when he worked in Boston and New York. “The New York workday starts later, but it goes later, too. There are different expectations about how long you stay at the office, and you're always rushing,” he says. Here, Richards returns from work in time to take his infant daughter for a stroll around the field surrounding his home in Williamsville.
“I had such a great time growing up here,” Richards says, “and I turned out okay."
'The climate of home'
In high school. Sara Anderson worked a summer job at a truck stop in Wyoming near Yellowstone and fell in love with the mountains. She graduated from BUHS in 1997 and attended Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., mostly on account of its location on a mesa and spectacular scenery overlooking the desert with the mountains in the distance. After earning her bachelor's degree, Anderson went on to graduate school at the University of Kentucky to study anthropology.
Anderson's graduate work focused on applied anthropology, and when she completed her master's, she knew she wanted to work in the social sciences, not seek an academic position. After being away for six years, she returned to visit her parents in Marlboro, where she'd grown up, and to decide what to do next.
That was in 2003. Six years later, Sara Anderson is still here, glad to be back in what she calls "the climate of home."
“I always loved Vermont,” she says. “I just didn't realize I loved Brattleboro until I came back.”
Anderson found part-time work before landing a position with Pathways for Youth, a job that plugged her into Brattleboro's social services, eventually leading to a job at Morningside Shelter, where she is now development director. “I love it there. It's a great place, a good cause,” Anderson says.
In addition to providing emergency housing, Morningside provides intensive case management to help people become housed sustainably. Morningside also provides support services for between 25 and 50 families who live outside the shelter.
Anderson now lives in Brattleboro, where she has bought a house through the Vermont Land Trust, “a great program for first-time homeowners,” she says. She has also become involved in local issues close to her heart, such as land and environmental conservation. She serves as an active member of the group trying to conserve 600 acres of Hogback Mountain in Marlboro.
“It's neat to be involved, and some of the people I work with are my former teachers, who still call me 'Sandy,' my childhood nickname,” she says. Working on the Hogback project brings up fond memories of school field trips up the mountain.
“We have some really great services in this town. We're really fortunate,” she says. She should know: she's just finished serving a three-year term as a representative to Town Meeting.
“For a small town, Brattleboro has a lot to offer,” Anderson says, citing her newest passion: rowing. “Rowing was not an option in Colorado,” Anderson says with a laugh, “but it's something I always wanted to try. Last year, I discovered the Putney Rowing Club. Now there's a rowing club in Brattleboro, too.”
Why not Vermont?
“I wanted out of Vermont,” P'tricia Wyse remembers. “I was itching to get out.”
And she had a plan, which Wyse, a 1984 BUHS graduate, articulated in her high school yearbook: “I want to be a world renown[ed] cosmetologist.”
She left for Chicago, to train at Pivot Point International Academy, one of the top schools for cosmetology, returning to Brattleboro the following year to get some experience. That's also when she started dating Evan Wyse, a boy she'd known since the second grade, and to whom she's now married.
From Brattleboro, she moved to a high-end salon in Massachusetts, where she worked for Linda Jodice, her mentor in both styling and the business of running a salon. By 1990, she was ready to take flight. She and Evan married, and she “dragged him out of Vermont.”
The couple moved to Nashville, where Evan's brother Eric was an entertainment producer, and instantly, P'tricia Wyse had work doing hair and makeup for music, television, and photo shoots. In between gigs, and while she was developing her freelance business, she filled in at a high-end salon.
And then, Anne Murray, the singer, asked P'tricia to go on the road as her personal stylist. For ten years, Wyse worked as part of Anne Murray's traveling show, spending three weeks at a time on the road, putting on about 80 shows every year.
The work took Wyse across the United States and Canada, giving her a chance to look around and see where she wanted to live. “Not in the South,” she says. “Nashville never felt like home.” She wanted some place in the North, where she could walk barefoot in the grass, where, she says, “I could be who I am.” Parts of northern California and the Pacific Northwest were appealing, she says, “but we kept coming back to New England.”
“Evan put his life on hold for me, which was very nice,” Wyse says; her husband worked a variety of jobs in information technology while she built her career. But, she figured, they could live anywhere in the country they wanted, as long as they could get to an airport.
So why not move back to Vermont? In 1996, they did.
“But how do you start a new life in your hometown?” Wyse asks with a broad grin. Their families live in Guilford, Brattleboro, and Dummerston, so the Wyses settled in Marlboro - close by, but not next door.
P'tricia and Evan Wyse had their first child in 2000, and P'tricia continued to tour, taking the baby with her. They even attempted one tour as a family of four after their second daughter was born in 2003, “But I couldn't do either of my jobs well,” Wyse confesses. “But by then, I'd been on the road for ten years. I was ready to give it up.”
Wyse now has her own studio on Flat Street, where she works alone. After all those years of traveling, she says, “I love being home for the holidays with the kids, for birthdays. And living here is perfect.” Her children attend kindergarten and third grade at the Marlboro Elementary School. “I love the closeness with the teachers at the school. Everybody knows everybody.”
After all those years of travel, Wyse has gained a real appreciation for what the Brattleboro area has to offer.
“Life shouldn't be centered around the mall and shopping,” she says. “I love having land to play on. I love being able to walk barefoot outside, on the grass.”