Steve Terry was a University of Vermont student on Nov. 6, 1962, when he stood in a Winooski election night crowd and saw Philip Hoff crowned — literally, with a tin-foil coronet tossed by a spectator — the first modern Democratic governor of the Green Mountain State after more than a century of Republican rule.
“I was an eyewitness, just a young, awestruck college student,” Terry recalled to this reporter 30 years later. “It was one of the defining moments of the 20th century history of Vermont.”
Terry didn’t know he’d go on to chronicle six decades of equally headline-grabbing events as a Vermont journalist and historian. Even with his recent diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, the Middlebury retiree stayed on top of the news — right up to his death Saturday at his home at age 82, his family announced in an email to friends.
“Nowadays, if it’s not on social media, it doesn’t exist,” Terry, a former Rutland Herald reporter and editor, said in a 2023 interview. “There seems to be an absence of memory of events that happened a week earlier, let alone years earlier. Maybe this is just my age, but we don’t seem to have deep introspection as to the roots of what’s happening today. History doesn’t seem to be in our culture anymore.”
Putting current events into context was an essential part of Terry’s life. Born in Windsor on Oct. 2, 1942, he was a high schooler when he began reporting on local sports for the weekly Vermont Journal and a University of Vermont student when he interviewed his peers for articles the school distributed to their hometown newspapers.
Terry had just started college in 1960 when he saw John F. Kennedy campaign in Burlington the day before the politician became the youngest person ever elected U.S. president.
“Like all students, I suppose, I was certainly enamored by JFK,” he recalled.
But Terry didn’t realize he was on the edge of a seismic shift. When Kennedy spoke at Burlington’s airport on Nov. 7, 1960, Vermont was anything but a Democratic stronghold. Instead, it was the only state in the nation to have supported the top of every Republican ticket since the GOP’s founding in 1854.
Attracting a tarmac crowd of 10,000 people, Kennedy nonetheless lost Vermont to Richard Nixon. But two years later, Terry saw Hoff claim a historic Democratic victory, sowing the seeds of the Republicans’ eventual loss of their legislative majority when Democrats won the state Senate in 1984 and the House in 1986.
“It was the tangible beginning of the new Vermont,” Terry recalled. “A lot of what we know about Vermont now had its beginnings there.”
The transition would prove to be turbulent. Terry was a University of Vermont senior when Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.
“I remember, like almost all people, exactly what I was doing when I heard the news that the president had been shot,” Terry recalled on the 60th anniversary. “I was at the library interviewing a student leader, then rushed back to my fraternity house. Minutes later, I saw that famous TV picture of Walter Cronkite announcing to the world that JFK was dead.”
Decades before cellphones, personal computers and cable, Vermonters relied on radios, television antennas and newspapers. Graduating college in 1964, Terry interned for six months at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island before covering Hoff’s second and third terms as a capitol reporter for the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, two of the state’s then-largest and most respected news outlets.
Terry joined the sister papers’ shared Vermont Press Bureau on the eve of the 1965 reapportionment of the state Legislature — ending the practice of giving every municipality its own House representative, regardless of population — and headed the office when it sent reporters to the 1968 presidential conventions.
“I drew the straw to cover the Republicans in Miami,” Terry recalled in a 2024 interview.
Terry reported on the GOP’s nomination of Nixon. A colleague traveled to Chicago to follow Democratic challenger Hubert Humphrey amid explosive protests against the Vietnam War, only to drop his press duties and demonstrate himself.
That created a challenge for Terry who, in Montpelier, suddenly had to cover what was happening inside the Democratic convention hall nearly 1,000 miles away. Turning to a television and landline telephone, he soon was investigating the fact that Hoff was being floated as an anti-war alternative for vice president.
“I certainly did wish I was on the scene in Chicago,” Terry recalled. “It had to be, from a journalistic perspective, one of the most amazing historic events.”
Terry wrote a retrospective on Hoff upon the governor’s exit in 1969, leading Terry’s college history professor, Samuel Hand, to assign it as required reading. The former student and teacher later teamed with friend and Newsday managing editor Anthony Marro to turn the retrospective into the 2011 book, “Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State.”
“In the years before Hoff, Vermont had been seen as a small and sleepy rural state where change came about only slowly and grudgingly,” Terry wrote in the book. “In the years during and after Hoff’s time as governor, Vermont became known for social ferment and rapid change.”
As a fledgling reporter, Terry dialed up another legendary Vermont figure — Republican U.S. Sen. George Aiken, who served from the beginning of World War II to the end of Nixon’s Watergate scandal — and discovered the politician who chose green for the color of the state’s license plates and coined the term “Northeast Kingdom” was willing to talk any time from early morning to late at night.
“I was learning on the job,” Terry recalled, “but he was never in a hurry to get off the phone.”
Terry made the first of several career transitions to join Aiken’s Washington, D.C., staff in 1969. He worked as a lead aide for the Senate Foreign Relations and Agriculture Committees until his boss’ retirement in 1975.
“I often took notes on the events I witnessed,” Terry recalled. “I had always aspired to do a book.”
Terry compiled the senator’s most important speeches in 2004’s “The Essential Aiken: A Life in Public Service.” He later wrote 2019’s “Say We Won and Get Out: George D. Aiken and the Vietnam War,” a biography centered on the senator’s oft-misquoted 1966 thoughts on U.S. involvement in Asia.
Terry filled the latter book with personal memories. He started by confirming other historians’ assertions that Kennedy was secretly planning to pull out of Vietnam after his anticipated reelection campaign in 1964.
“Aiken told me when I was on his staff that it was told to him in confidence,” Terry said in a 2019 interview. “Was Aiken right about Kennedy’s resolve to get out of Vietnam after the 1964 elections? We will never emphatically know the answer.”
Terry also remembered the time an 80-year-old Aiken was contemplating retirement in 1973 when a 31-year-old freelance writer convinced the elder statesman to sit for an interview.
The aspiring scribe’s name: Bernie Sanders.
“My job as Aiken’s aide,” Terry recalled, “was to take the very long-haired Bernie to lunch in the ornate U.S. Senate dining room.”
Terry said the contrast between Sanders and Aiken was striking: A young Brooklyn-born revolutionary conversing with a lifelong Republican tagged by his congressional colleagues as “the wise old owl.” But the resulting story in Vermont Life magazine’s spring 1973 issue showed a surprising degree of consensus between two men now considered among the state’s most legendary U.S. senators.
Terry returned to journalism upon Aiken’s retirement to work as founding editor of the Sunday Herald and Times Argus in 1975 and managing editor of the daily Herald from 1977 to 1985. He then moved to a corporate career as a communications executive at Green Mountain Power from 1985 to 2014. At the same time, he helped found the nonprofit Vermont Journalism Trust that oversees VTDigger.
Growing up milking cows by hand at his grandfather and uncle’s dairy farm, Terry retired to raise a small herd of Belted Galloway beef cattle. He left full-time work after receiving the Vermont Chamber of Commerce’s 2014 Citizen of the Year award at a ceremony that featured written testimonials from prominent peers.
“Steve is, in the true sense of the word, a public citizen,” former Gov. Madeleine Kunin said in her statement. “While he has been employed full-time in the private sector, he has had an impact on public life in Vermont.”
Friends ranging from former Gov. Howard Dean to The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer (who got her start as Terry’s first Herald hire) recently contacted Terry to express their own appreciation after learning of his declining health. Many were encouraged by Terry’s wife Faith, who noted “his mind is ever active and engaged.”
Christopher Graff, former head of the Associated Press’ Vermont bureau, said Terry was the rare person who could juggle jobs in the press, politics and power industry.
“They said of Aiken he was neither hawk nor dove but a wise owl,” Graff said. “That’s the role Steve played for decades, helping reporters, governors and CEOs work through tough times and decisions. Steve really was one of the last links to those huge personalities and to those history-making times.”
Disclosure: Jane Mayer is a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, which operates VTDigger.
