“The wrestling team is dead! Joe’s dead!” screamed Mary Miller in 1991, as a fire ripped through her Middleton home. Her son Joe’s wrestling team was spending the night, and a burning candle sparked a tremendous fire.
“The smoke alarm went off at 3 in the morning,” Miller recounted. “I ran out in my sweatshirt and undies. I’m screaming. I ran back in, looking for eight boys and couldn’t find them. The ceiling collapsed ….”
A neighbor pulled Miller out of the fire. She was hospitalized with second- and third-degree burns to her face, feet, and hands. The kids, as it turned out, had left in the middle of the night to buy a video, and her daughter was not at home at the time. All were fine, but the home burned to the ground. “I came home with toothpaste and a hospital gown and nothing else,” she recalled. “And that’s where my life restarted.”
Miller, co-owner of Middleton Travel since 1983, learned that night not to sweat the small stuff. “To have nothing – relative to going through the 15 minutes that I thought my son was dead – makes you realize that stuff is just stuff, and need is minimized.”
Much has changed since Miller and her best friend, Pam Wencel, purchased the travel agency. “Back then, she said, “you had a choice of being a mom or a career person, but by no means both.” In fact, the bank wouldn’t allow the women to purchase the agency without their husbands’ signatures. At that time the company was reporting gross sales of $400,000. It now generates $16 million.
The travel industry blossomed through the 1990s, resulting in nearly 50,000 agencies nationwide. Then the Internet gained popularity, and people began booking their own travel. Now, Miller said, things have come full circle.
“Once travelers realized all the problems that can occur, they saw the benefits agents bring.” With about 15,000 agencies nationwide today, Miller predicts a robust industry over the next five years.
That, of course, depends upon current events, because the travel industry is impacted largely by unknowns, such as the economy, weather, community, or world crises. “Natural disasters validate why we’re here,” Miller said almost apologetically, expounding on the services agents provide when things go awry. “We must think out of the box.”
That became most apparent at the 1994 Rose Bowl game, Miller’s worst experience, when several travel agencies were scammed out of game tickets. Just a couple of days prior, the agency realized what was happening. With 150 rabid Badger fans making the trek out to the game, Miller made a frantic call back home to family, asking them to wire $65,000 to California, which was immediately converted to cash. “On Dec. 30, four of us hit the streets of L.A., purchasing tickets (averaging $450 each) wherever we could so our customers would get in. By 5 p.m. on Dec. 31, we had them all. In my small world, that was an introduction to life not being fair.”
But her life has been both rich, with trips around the world and travels to the far reaches of six of seven continents, and tempered – though not slowed – by an MS diagnosis in 1996.
Through it all, the co-owners have remained best friends. “Between our families – marriages, divorce, kids, the fire, moving – and the business, we’re together every day, and have a glass of wine every night,” she said. “We feel very lucky.”
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