| | | Our 2024 Community Partner
While the challenges continue, so do the good works done by our neighbors, our teachers, our health care providers, our volunteers and so many others. This is their story. Ledyard National Bank is proud to support the 2024 Hometown Heroes, who were nominated by members of the community and selected by editors of the Concord Monitor. Nominate your Hometown Hero Today. |
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| | Hometown Hero: Jim Milliken has spent 8 decades making Concord ‘a better place to live’
By SOPHIE LEVENSON Monitor staff
From his seat in a shaded booth at The Works, underneath a picture of wild blueberries, Jim Milliken gestures at Main Street. “I painted every parking meter you can see,” he says. |
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| He also changed the lightbulbs in traffic lights and touched up the white paint around parking spaces. In high school, Milliken’s job with the police department gave him his first title as a member of the Concord community. It was the first of many.
In the nearly 80 years Milliken has lived in Concord, he has found numerous ways to serve his city. The life he has spent working for the public comes not from an incentive for recognition or power, but rather from a pride in and love for the place he has always called home.
“We have great people in this community,” he says. “Ninety-nine percent … there are some curmudgeons, I guess would be the word.”
The day Milliken turned 21, in 1965, he marched into the police station that had given him his first job and asked to become an officer. They told him he could start that Monday, and he did, and then every Monday for eight years. He attended the University of New Hampshire the first few years that he worked, making him a special officer until graduation.
When Vietnam interrupted his tenure as a Concord cop, Milliken served a year in the Criminal Investigation Department for the U.S. Army. He would have stuck with the military for longer, but was told he couldn’t take Susan, who he had just married, along to his new posting. So Milliken went home, put his police badge back on and stayed in Concord with the love of his life.
With the exception of a quick year in Warner, the couple never left. Susan encouraged her husband to make their hometown a better place, and Milliken did as he was told. He loved Susan as much as a man can love — they were married for 54 years before she suddenly died last August.
As much as he loves Concord, Milliken always wanted to improve it. He served on the board of the Concord Regional Crimeline so he could “make this a better place to live.” He remembers when Main Street was cobblestoned and is proud of the roads he helped build with the Chamber of Commerce.
He is good at balancing history with progress: As chair of the Concord Historical Society — and simply as someone who has lived the better part of a century in the city — Milliken knows all the good parts of the Concord of old, enough to bury anyone in nostalgia. But he doesn’t bury himself; he appreciates change, as long as it’s for the better. If there is one thing about the future that frightens him, it is the loss of service from individuals to their communities.
“You’ve got to stay vital and active in your community and you’ve got to give back,” he says. “That’s what democracy is all about. You have got to do your part.”
Milliken has done his part. It is one thing to focus one’s career on public service, another to dedicate one’s free time. In the 1990s, he served on the original board of Volunteer New Hampshire; he was also on the first board for the Abbot-Downing Historical Society in the late 1970s. At the turn of the century, Milliken became president of Jobs for New Hampshire’s Graduates, an organization that puts disadvantaged kids on track to graduate, earn scholarships and find jobs.
Milliken didn’t grow up all that differently from those kids. He had parents who drank and didn’t give him much attention. His neighbors, however, filled the gaps and took care of him when his parents couldn’t or wouldn’t. Milliken resolved to give them something back.
“Get involved and give back to your community … start in your family, they need you,” he says.
Even though, as a kid, he once tried to buy a soda on Main Street with Monopoly money, Milliken cares deeply about local business. He was the executive director of the city’s Chamber of Commerce between 1975 and 1985, and in 1996, he was its Citizen of the Year.
For the last two decades, he has worked for Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal financial services organization, essentially selling life insurance. Built into the member-owned company, however, is a service aspect: Through Modern Woodmen, Milliken got involved with Arbor Day, the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness and the Regional Food Program. He is able to use company resources to support the community, as doing so also supports the community belonging to his clients.
Milliken found something of a niche with Arbor Day. In May, the city honored him with its first annual “Tree Champion” award to thank him for planting more than 20 trees over a 16-year stretch (trees are expensive, so that’s quite a lot) and teaching local children how to do it, too. As of this year, Milliken has planted a tree in every park in Concord.
With Susan, Milliken built the volunteer work that sits, perhaps, closest to his heart. Susan suffered from bipolar disorder, so 17 years ago, the couple founded the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance Concord, a group that allows anyone with mental health issues to speak up in a space free of professionals but filled with open ears. Milliken says that most adults with bipolar disorder are divorced, if they were ever married, because of a lack of understanding from their spouses about the illness. Milliken, who runs on empathy, never wanted to divorce his wife — he simply wanted to help her. With DBSA, and with Susan, he did just that.
At 80, Milliken has not stopped his various community endeavors. He is still, actively, a hero. But that’s not just because of his volunteer work and his endless hours of community service. He’s not a hero just because of Arbor Day, or because he’s still hosting events like that in the wake of his wife’s death. Milliken can don his cape because of his gentle spirit and kind heart; because, in his red and white pinstripe shirt, with the pen in his breast pocket and his pair of wire-rimmed glasses, he looks like a grandfather you’d find in an animated movie, and he acts like it, too.
Milliken sips his iced coffee as he holds open the door to The Works and steps outside. The heavy heat greets him in the heart of Concord, right where he belongs.
Sophie Levenson can be reached at [email protected]. |
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