Terry’s Remarkable Journey
“Bloom where you are planted!”
The headlines of Terry’s adult journey are very remarkable and occasionally, to quote the evil Sicilian, Vizzini, in The Princess Bride, sometimes her experiences were “Inconceivable!”. So, as a warm-up to these highlights, repeat after me, giving your best Vizzini impression; Inconceivable!!!
College #1 Undergrad
With limited funds to work with, Terry attended two years at Diablo Valley College, intending to major in pre-med at a UC.
Terry attended UC Berkeley for a quarter or two before concluding, very practically, that with few resources, she would be able to go to nursing school instead and begin earning $$$ much sooner.
Terry completed nursing school at Sacramento State, being licensed as an RN and as a Public Health Nurse. And while she was there, she completed all but one course to double major in Spanish literature!
Fun facts: While attending Sac State, Terry spent a summer, studying in Spain to further her Spanish skills! For those of you who are familiar with Tim’s very unusual ancestry story (!), Terry debunked the “Magic Pill” myth by questioning her nursing school faculty! Inconceivable!
Career #1 RN at Mt Diablo Hospital in Concord
Fun facts: Yep, these were the days when hospital nurses wore white uniforms, white stockings, white shoes and a variety of ‘Flying Nun”, odd nursing hats! Can you imagine Terry the RN? Inconceivable! As a harbinger of the success she would have throughout her career, Terry, the young nurse, was soon made a Charge Nurse, a team leader over other nurses! Remarkable!
Career #2 Public Health Nurse for Contra Costa County Health
Fun facts: This was Terry’s first experience in public health, which became a calling throughout the rest of her career!
Life #1 Marriage!!!
Fun Facts: Terry and Tim get married at Green Valley Country Club at Terry’s parents’ “suggestion”. It was a crazy hot day and there was plenty of champaign. After the ceremony, Tim’s friends had too good of a time and the club may have banned weddings ever since! Terry quits the job she loved and moved to live within a commuting range of Tim’s job. They bought a honeymoon cottage in Nevada City that was built in the 1920’s and which had 635 square feet of floor space, all for $35,000… Inconceivable!
Career #3 School Nurse for Nevada Union High School
Fun facts: To become a school nurse, Terry needed to earn a school nursing credential. At Nevada Union, Terry’s early progressive nature came out and she became active in developing a continuing education program for pregnant high school girls! Keep in mind, this was rural America and there were pre-Trumpists who were rather exorcised about her activities!
Life #2 First Best Couple Friends! Jymmey and Brian Purtil, of Grass Valley
Fun facts: Jymmey & Brian and Terry & Tim bonded as young couples starting out and eventually raising families together. The four of us have been soul mates for over 45 years, both couples now living in Sonoma County! Jymmey was also a nurse, now retired, and she and Terry were in nursing school together and later, as new friends, went through the school nursing credential program together!
Life #3 Built a custom home at Lake Wildwood in 1979
Fun facts: Tim’s dad George was near retirement as a carpenter and offered to build a spec-house from scratch with Tim to help fund Tim going to graduate school, having been accepted into a Phd program at Cornell. Terry, her parents and Brian Purtil helped along the way! The plan was that while Tim became a grad student, Terry would work as a nurse in Ithaca, NY to pay the rent. Two twists made this experience more exciting than anticipated: As the project ‘broke ground’, Terry discovered that she was pregnant! Then, interest rates soared to 21 percent which all but killed the real estate market! Inconceivable!!!
Life #4 Ali was born!!!
Fun facts: Terry and especially Tim, at 25 & 24 respectively, were naïve, first-time parents and Ali was born over a month past her supposed due-date… Inconceivable!
Life #5 Career course correction for Tim: No grad school…yet!
Fun facts: Tim takes a higher paying job in Sacramento which results in the family moving to Davis. They contract with a builder to build a new home.
College #2 Law school at McGeorge in Sacramento
Fun facts: Terry, who had continued to consider eventually going to medical school, once again made a practical decision to go to law school instead, which would allow her to operate in a higher, professional role and, of course, allow her to elevate her earnings much sooner than med school! A key benefit of McGeorge was that it offered a night program which allowed Terry to keep her day-job. Turns out McGeorge was a cut-throat, private school and yet, as perhaps the only student with a child, Terry finished her first year at the top of her class (#2!) Remarkable!
Career #4 Public health nurse at a federal health clinic in Woodland
Fun facts: This was Terry’s first professional role that used her expertise in Spanish. In this role, Terry also had tough experiences with cases that involved child protective services…
College #3 UC Berkeley, Boalt Hall Law School
Fun facts: Terry was able to transfer from McGeorge, which had a decent, regional reputation to UC Berkeley’s law school which was ranked high nationally and take the last two years of law school at UC. However, Tim and Terry were living in Davis and the Berkeley law school was exclusively a full-time, day program. Luckily, there was a UC bus that commuted between the campuses daily, so Terry began riding the bus. Remarkable!
Life #6 Pregnancy #2
Fun facts: As a nurse who taught health and family planning as a high school nurse, Terry planned to engineer this birth to occur soon after the second-year final exams of law school. Best laid plans… Peter was born (Yay!!!) midway through finals… Oh, well!!
Career #5 Terry Leach, Attorney at Law
Highlights: Terry becomes an Associate at a diversified law firm in Sacramento, getting her feet wet in business law while dealing with a predator partner…
Life #7 T & T decide on a course correction and move to the inner Bay Area
Highlights: To allow Tim to move into senior management and hopefully allow Terry to work part-time in law, they decide to move to Alameda when Tim is promoted into a new career path in SF.
Career #6 Terry moves into the big league: Pillsbury Madison & Sutro
Highlights: Terry worked in a variety of areas until Pillsbury recruited a senior, experienced winery lawyer to develop a winery law practice for the firm and Terry was assigned to be this new partners Associate… and Terry didn’t drink, nor appreciate wine… Inconceivable!
After a while, George Sears, the managing partner for the firm, who knew that Terry was a nurse, offered her the partnership track opportunity to start a health law practice for the firm… Remarkable!
However, with two little kids, Terry preferred to be able to be a mom and a lawyer, so she joined the new team as an associate.
Life #8 T & T decide to move to Orinda because of the great public schools
Fun fact: Their first house, on Hillcrest, was the first of four houses they would own in Orinda over many years… Inconceivable!
Career #7 Terry decides to focus on health law at Hanson Bridget
Fun facts: This firm was a primary health law firm within the SF Bay Area and had large, established clients. This was the chapter where Terry became a senior health law attorney. As an example, Terry represented one of their clients, Children’s Hospital, as counsel for its Ethics committee, which dealt with impossible, life and death situations regularly.
Life #9 Terry the runner
Funfacts: Terry and great friend, Jan Hale, train together to run a marathon. With little kids, busy lives and crazed husbands, they would run at dawn. They successfully ran the Napa marathon. Unfortunately, a freak late winter, arctic blast hit which turned their marathon into a race for survival!! Inconceivable!
Life #10 Katie is born!!!
Life #11 Life is expensive in Orinda with three kids. Tim is offered his first executive job…in Portland, Oregon and the family moves out of state for the first time.
Life #12 Now there is plenty of money, Terry attempts to find a Portland attorney job.
Highlights: This was during the period when anti-California sentiment was high in Oregon. Terry butts her head against several walls and then decides to pivot…
Career #8 Terry becomes a writer!
Fun facts: As a means to vent major frustration (Tim & Portland & loss of Lamorinda friends), Terry dives into writing and cranks out an entire novel called Settling! As an autobiographical “fiction”, only the names were changed to protect the ‘innocent’!! Settling is the story of a nice attorney/mom who is yanked from her loving friends, family and home by her overly ambitious, banker/husband named Tom, to God forsaken Portland… Luckily, in the story, Tom dies a horrible death!
Settling had real promise of publication. A NY based agent represented the book and shopped it to major publishing houses. There was interest but doubts about whether a movie could be made…
Terry, alive with passion for her new calling, then dove into another novel. This one was large in scope and complexity. Ultimately, Terry concluded that while attorneys write legalese like nobody’s business, attorneys weren’t trained to communicate with normal humans. So, she decided to go back to school!… Remarkable!
College #4 Bennington College, Vermont
Highlights: Terry attended a ‘low-residency’ MFA program, in which she needed to be on-campus a couple times a year and work remotely in-between.
Life #13 Terry and the Hood to Coast Relay
Fun Facts: While in Portland, Terry continued to be an active runner. She gets intrigued by a famous relay race called the Hood to Coast, one of the most popular, team relay races in the world, referred to as the ‘Mother of all relays’! The race is run by teams of 12 runners who run alternating segments around the clock to cover 198 miles, beginning near the top of Mt Hood and ending at the Pacific Ocean. No surprise, Terry is the team leader for her team. Remarkable!
Career #9 Terry, professional writer
Highlights: Now with her MFA, Terry focused on story stories and non-fiction articles instead of novels. A few of her short stories were published in national journals! Remarkable!
Career Foreshadow: Politics!
Fun facts: One of Tim’s largest clients while in Portland was a NY based, family-owned mutual fund company. The owner, a New England conservative named Lacy Herrmann and Tim became good friends. Lacy grew very attached to Terry, despite her being a hard-core progressive. Lacy hosted a conference one year and had the notable conservative, Art Laffer, as key-note speaker. Laffer had been Reagan’s Chief Economic Adviser and it was Laffer’s infamous ‘Laffer Curve’ that supported “Trickle-down economics”, which became the cornerstone for Reagan’s landmark tax cuts. Lacy thought it would be oh-so-fun (he was a scamp!) to have Terry positioned at the same dinner table as Art, just to see the sparks fly. The dinner show wasn’t disappointing. Terry and Art didn’t agree on anything. Surprisingly, despite their oil/vinegar differences, after dinner, Art approached Terry and asked her to call Jack Kemp, who at the time was in charge of recruiting new members for the RNC. Terry talked to Kemp and was told that if she ran for a Congressional seat in Oregon (as a Republican!), she wouldn’t have a raise a dime and she could even vote the way she wanted on most issues. However, in classic Godfather fashion, she was also told that on certain other votes, they would expect her to return the favor… They didn’t care that she was a Democrat. They wanted women to run and who they could control when the time came… Inconceivable!
Needless to say, Terry declined. At the time, she was not active politically. This was her first exposure…!
Life #14 Tim’s bank gets sold to a Minneapolis bank
Highlights: With no opportunities to work back in the Bay Area, Tim pursues positions nationally.
Life #15 Tim accepts new position in Chicago
Highlights: Wanting a foothold back in Orinda, Terry buys a small house there. Meanwhile, Tim buys a house in Lake Forest and eventually the family moves to the upper Midwest in their second, inter-state move…
Terry continues to write and finds some high-quality writing programs in the Midwest and publishes more stories.
Life #16 Health/life crisis for Tim’s dad
Highlights: The family needed to get back to the Bay Area to help Tim’s dad and luckily, Tim’s former bank in SF offered him an executive role! The family moved back to Orinda, initially to the smaller house Terry had bought and then to a very large home they bought that would accommodate Tim’s father too.
Career #10 Terry returns to Hanson Bridget
Highlight: Terry dives back into health law.
Career #11 Bush V Gore!!!
Fun facts: The 2000 election that was decided by the Supreme Court was like the psychic match that lit Terry’s fuse and like a rocket, she blasted into a new career: politics! Initially, she talked her law firm into supporting a Pro Bono project of working on mail-in ballots for California like Oregon had. Over a thousand work-hours later, the firm decided that she should pursue her passion in politics outside of the firm…
Career #12 Lamorinda Democratic Club
Fun facts: Initially one of the volunteers, Terry soon became its Vice President. The Club rapidly under fired-up leadership. Eventually, Terry became the Club President and the Lamorinda Dem Club was one of the most powerful in the whole Bay Area… Remarkable!
Life #17 Downsizing on Scenic Drive
Of note: After the traumatic end of Tim’s dad’s life, T & T decide to consolidate homes, selling the very large house on Scenic and the small home Terry had bought earlier, trading both into another house on Scenic that fit the family better, after finishing a major remodeling project, one of several remodelings that Terry supervised over the years.
Career #13 Health legislation under CA state Senator Torlakson
Fun facts: Terry became an attorney on staff for the Senator. During this time, she led a successful campaign to fight the soft-drink industry and get soft-drinks out of its death grip over school children throughout California! Remarkable!
Career #14 Manager, the Lakoff Foundation
Highlights: George Lakoff, UC Berkeley professor, is a pioneer in political linguistics for democrats and formed a foundation from the proceeds of his best seller, Don’t Think of an Elephant, to advise progressive political campaigns on the most effective use of the words they use.
Life #18 The Howard Dean campaign
Fun facts: As President of the Lamorinda Dems, Terry led the charge to support Dean’s run for the Presidency for Contra Costa County. Terry and Tim went to Iowa to participate in the Iowa Caucus that year and stump for Dean. On the night of the Caucus, T & T were in the ballroom at the event where Dean made his now famous scream, which ended his campaign and taught them a huge lesson in cut-throat politics.
Career #15 Campaign Strategist for John Garamendi’s successful run to become CA Lieutenant Governor
Fun Facts: Terry proved to be very effective at torpedoing the opponent! Remarkable!
A major Garamendi donor (a Sikh), tried to arrange a marriage between his son and Ali!… Inconceivable!
By this time, Terry had a strong reputation in California politics. Terry was approached by the Democratic party to run for elected office and they ran some polls to test how well she would likely do. The polls were favorable, but after some soul searching, Terry decided to pass on the opportunity… but has long wondered about this road not taken.
Life #19 Tim experiences a Game of Thrones episode (think the Red Wedding!) at work and ends up leaving the bank.
Highlight: Tim can only find a role far away from the prior bank because of one executive there (think Baron Harkonen!) and accepts a position in NY. Katie is still in high school and both of Terry’s parents are in failing health, so she stays in Orinda.
Life #20 Terry loses both parents
Of note: As sometimes happens in long marriages, Terry’s sweet dad, Erwin passed in mid-2007 and then her talented mother, Rosalie died nine months afterward. Terry was very involved during the last chapters of each of her parents.
Life #21 Tim’s NY company is sold and a former bank, now in Minnesota hires him back and into a senior role
Highlights: T & T buy a house in Minneapolis and keep Orinda house. Terry spends time in both locations
Career #16 UC Office of the President: UC Health
Highlights: Terry accepts senior role responsible for coordinating healthcare quality for the UC system, the largest academic health care system in the world.
UC goes through a strategic process to form strong bridges across the six medical schools and huge, teaching hospitals in its system. Terry is charged with helping to create consistent healthcare quality standards and delivery across the system… herding very large, powerful cats…as it were! Inconceivable!
Career #17 Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public Health, University of MN
Highlights: UCOP goes through financial distress and invokes a partial, indefinite furlough. Terry approaches U of M and teaches semester courses like Advocacy to grad students until the UCOP furlough is lifted. Remarkable!
Career #18 Retirement from UCOP and lecturing at UCSF
Highlights: Terry retired from the UC Office of the President in 2015 and immediately hooked up with the Dean at UCSF who asked her to become a lecturer in their graduate medical leadership program… Remarkable!
Life #22 Planning for retirement; buys vacation house in Healdsburg
Fun facts: Terry thought this would be a weekend house, however, we fell in love with Healdsburg and a ton of new and some very old friends!
Career #19 Health Consultant for Sonoma County
Highlights: Sonoma County hired Terry to help plan and implement a comprehensive strategic plan for health services and delivery.
Life #23 Healdsburg AAUW
Highlights: Terry became an active member of AAUW, ultimately joining the board of directors and leading various programs.
Career #20 Board member for Alliance Health Center, Healdsburg
Highlights: Terry joins the board of this FQHC, which provides health services to approximately 14,000 low-income patients from northern Sonoma County. During her six-year tenure, Terry served as Vice Chair of the board. When Covid vaccines became available, Terry help lead an area wide campaign to vaccinate as many Healdsburg and Winsor residents as possible, especially food service workers, resulting in the highest vaccination rates in the northern Bay Area. Terry was also asked to lead a new, professional task force on opioid use which resulted in training police officers in procedures to use Narcan in overdose situations and maintain Narcan supplies in city offices, libraries and schools, which directly saved several lives… Remarkable!
Life #24 Move to our primary residence in Healdsburg
Highlights: T & T decided to make Healdsburg their primary residence and sell the smaller home near the Plaza and buy a larger property on the side of Fitch Mountain as their primary residence.
Life #25 Grandkids!!!
Fun facts: In 2018, Ali lived in Tacoma, Peter lived in SF and Katie lived in New Haven, CT. By mid-2019, all three with their spouses/partners had moved to the east Bay Area and the first two grandkids were born, one week apart! Inconceivable!
During the next five years, four more grandkids were born, resulting in Terry having six grandkids under six years old!! Double inconceivable!!
Career #21 Healdsburg and Petaluma Community hospitals, Provident Health System
Highlights: After Terry retired from the Alliance board, she was recruited to join the community boards of both Healdsburg and Petaluma Community hospitals, which had both been recently acquired by Provident Health
Life #26 Half-time back in Walnut Creek
Highlights: Given the explosion of grandkids that Terry has been blessed with and her interest to be a very active grandma (Nana!), T & T bought a second home in Walnut Creek in order to spend meaningful time with the three growing families. This house was remodeled to be an ideal grandparent house, hosting the flock of ‘littles’ as often as possible! Remarkable!
Career #22 Medicare Counselor, HiCAP
Highlights: Through a friend who had gotten involved years earlier, Terry decided that her next calling would be to help low-income seniors by going through the intense process of education and training, including being fingerprinted, to become a certified Medicare Counselor through the Contra Costa County HiCAP program, a voluntary role and incredibly needed! So remarkable!
These are the major headlines of Terry’s journey to date… and her journey continues!
How remarkable!!!