terry santmann

“We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.”
– Luciano de Crescenzo

By MaryJane Butters

In putting together this [my "No Place Like Home"] issue, I asked people to define the word “home.” Their replies were far reaching, sometimes far flung. They almost always described a dwelling, but sometimes home was a refuge, or a sanctuary. Sometimes home was a birthplace or a motherland. Sometimes it was a feeling like homey, or safe. My mother’s definition involved my father, “home now,” his final resting place, his journey’s end.

But when I asked those same people to define the word “homemaker,” the reply was always the same. She (always a “she”) is someone who is friendly, organized, efficient, motherly (takes good care of others), is in charge, a good manager of time, persistent, consistently cheerful, determined to keep things clean, a good multi-tasker. When I pressed them further, they said their image was a woman from the ’50s, in an apron, supported by a man, and … obsolete, or nearly so.

Homemakers aren’t becoming obsolete, I thought. But our definition sure is. If you saw the list of skills above on a resume or in a letter of reference, would you see dollar signs? Would you see a money maker? A top employee? If you were a banker, would you lend her money for a business enterprise? What if she lacked a college degree and said, “But I’m a homemaker.” And with pride, she looked you straight in the eye, “I’m organized and efficient. I manage people well. I keep things clean. I’m fun, even playful at times. I do cry easily, but when necessary, I can be unbelievably strong and stand my ground no matter what. And I’m good at creating a sense of place. I fix that longing to belong, if you know what I mean.” Would you see her as a potential leader, a CEO?

In the best selling book, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” author Robert Kiyosaki claims the majority of Fortune 500 companies are started by people without business degrees, usually no college degree at all. Instead, they possess certain can-do, will-do traits. More important, they want to be rich. They aim to be moneymakers.

Terry Santmann is a self-made female millionaire, possessing those same Fortune 500 can-do, will-do traits. She even lacks a business degree. But she doesn’t wheel and deal real estate, stocks, own a mining company or a fleet of trucks, and she isn’t driven by the need to be rich just for the sake of being rich. Terry is a homemaker, redefined.

Terry spent the first 17 years of her life on a dairy farm, where her family of 14 barely eked out a living. Winters were bitterly cold, and their poverty so searing, it stole all hope of betterment. So, at age 17, with $18 in her pocket, Terry left home, working every make-do job imaginable, from seamstress to taxicab driver. She eventually married, and three months into her second pregnancy, her husband was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. For many years, Terry cared for her quadriplegic husband and growing children by working part-time jobs. Even with her enormous burden, Terry found time to spearhead a food drive for unemployed coal miners. “You can always find someone who needs help even more than you,” she said.

Along the way, she decided that her children, whose grandparents lived hundreds of miles away, needed a grandparent. She called 12 nursing homes in the area with the idea of adopting a grandparent. But the first 12 homes she called coldly refused her offer. The 13th call changed her life. “The woman who answered invited me to a rather dilapidated mansion, the last mansion owned by the Jones family of “Jones Beach” fame. She had tried to turn the mansion into an adult home, but couldn’t get permission to have enough patients to pay the mortgage. But that visit was how I learned such a thing as an ‘adult home’ even existed.” I thought, “If I could start one, I could continue to keep my family together.”

Lack of financial backing didn’t stop Terry from calling every realtor in the county to find a possible rental. Finally, an ad in the personals led her to a woman willing to rent a four-bedroom apartment in Babylon, New York, that had the potential to be renovated into an adult home.

Terry opened up an adult home with her husband as her first patient, putting in 14- to 18-hour days spackling and painting walls, cooking meals, cleaning, and everything else from plumbing to bookkeeping, while continuing to be a good wife and mother. As soon as one room was renovated, she moved the family into another and started all over again. When Terry found an opportunity to buy the rental and an adjacent property, she saw the potential to provide a home for even more people.

But in the early 1960s, it was a given that an aspiring “homemaker” applying for a bank loan was likely to encounter obstacles. After all, businesswomen weren’t common back then. When Terry applied for a loan to buy the properties, she recalls one banker telling her, “You’re never going to get a loan in your situation.”

Unwilling to take no for an answer, Terry persisted until she was approved for a loan. With that $38,000 loan, and $20,000 from two insurance policies that paid out on doctors’ assurances that her husband was terminally ill, along with her husband’s Social Security and Veteran’s Disability benefits, she bought the properties that became the now 69-bed Little Flower Adult Home.

In 1964, needing relief from such hard work, and in keeping with her adventurous spirit still evident today (she recently returned from a trip to the North Pole on a nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker with only 100 passengers representing 18 different countries), she purchased a 37-foot boat with a specially designed chair and boom that lifted her husband from her car and into the new boat. “I became adept at piloting, and one trip took us up the Hudson River, across Lake Champlain and into Canadian waters.”

In the late ’60s, Terry completed studies and received a degree as a registered nurse. In 1972, she became the first woman in New York state to get an FHA loan for a nursing home with only her name on the contract. She designed and oversaw the building of the 160-bed Little Flower Nursing Home in nearby Islip, New York. The unique six-wing utilitarian layout of Little Flower is entirely Terry’s design, with each resident’s room opening onto an area visible to the nurse’s station. Four years later, in 1976, her husband passed away.

The success of the adult home and the nursing home encouraged Terry to build another facility. In 1992, she built a third facility — the 180-bed Petite Fleur Nursing Home, located in Sayville, New York.

Striving always to make people more comfortable, she became the Mother of Invention in 1993 by developing a walker with a folding, pivoting seat apparatus and harness, for which she received a patent.

In addition to caring for the elderly, Terry designed and made possible a 48-by-50-foot respite care center for the Suffolk County Girl Scouts. The center was built on the 33-acre Girl Scout Camp in Yaphank. The center “In Katie’s Care” is named for Terry’s granddaughter.

Her list of community projects is long, but several stand out. Following the 1998 ice storm in northern New York state that devastated farmers, Terry paid for the shipping of calves in early 1998, then pregnant heifers in September 1999, and again in April and August of 2000. She is the sole sponsor of 40 students at St. Luke’s School in the Bronx. Along the way, she perfected her public speaking skills and has given many speeches and taped dozens of TV documentaries that include producing and hosting “Your Health — We Care” that was featured on CNN. She also hosted a 30-minute TV special called “Splashes of Hope.” She received an honorary Doctor of Science degree and a Distinguished Citizen award from Dowling College in 1999. In 2002, she sponsored a Rotary Peace Conference on conflict resolutions. Over 1,200 students attended from 40 high schools across Long Island. And, from 1998-2004, Terry served as President of the Babylon Village Chamber of Commerce.

Terry loves caring for others. And she’s darn good at it. At age 73, she still runs the Little Flower Nursing Home, working as many hours as someone half her age. The Petite Fleur is now run by her daughter. She employs more than 400 people, and has been a “homemaker” to thousands of people, and most recently us.

If there are angels among us, Terry Santmann is ours. Sometimes referred to as an angel investor, Terry has been more than a financial hand-up to us. George Eliot said, “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.” Her investment has allowed us to rough-out three floors on the top of the earth-berm 2,000-square-foot commercial food facility that my husband, our children, volunteers and I constructed after we lost our home in a late-night fire, the result of a newly installed chimney that was faulty.

When our new facility is finished (and we just don’t know when that will be), MaryJanesFarm will be home to an old-fashioned country store; a stitching room; a hat-making room; a library; a commercial kitchen; a bed and breakfast; a photographic studio; a magazine/book/video-graphy design studio; bookkeeping offices; and an elevator for handicapped accessibility and, of course, grains! Until we finish off and complete the three floors that Terry’s investment has framed, roofed and windowed, we’ll continue to produce our food in the earth-sheltered first floor of our “someday farmhouse.”

There’s just no place like home, especially ours, the one that love and Terry, possessing the highest degree attainable, Homemaker Hm.R., is helping us create.

P.S. For the record, Terry doesn’t respond to solicitations. She connected with us when she discovered our magazine in a Barnes & Noble bookstore and sent us a story for our Keeping In Touch section about her memories attending school in a one-room schoolhouse (our “Shoulder to the Wheel” Issue). I proceeded to lose her contact information to tell her that we had eventually run her story. About the time I was working on my book proposal and avoiding any phone calls, my husband popped in to say, “I think this is a phone call you’ll want to take. It’s a woman who wants to give us money to help us rebuild our home!” It was none other than Theresa Santmann, Hm.R., Honorary Homemaker.