A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : 2 Committed to Each Other, Helping People

When Maury and Lillian Millard revealed their secret teen-age marriage, many said, “It’ll never last.”

But the naysayers were wrong and next month, the Studio City couple, who have two sons and three grand-daughters, will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. Keeping a promise to Lillian’s parents when they gave her permission to marry at age 16, the couple married again--in a Jewish religious service--after she graduated from high school.

“In 1935, commitment meant something,” Lillian Millard said.

The couple met on a blind date, and their romance blossomed as Lillian fell in love with Maury’s sense of humor. Their marriage lasted, Maury Millard said, because of an ability to resolve arguments, a mutual respect of each other’s goals and a common interest in community affairs.

Indeed, the Millards have had a long commitment to community service. Issues they have tackled, jointly and separately, include education, youth, drug addiction, rehabilitation of parolees and probationers, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, the elderly and the arts.

“I didn’t realize we had done all of those things,” said Lillian Millard, who was director of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act office in Los Angeles when she retired in 1982.

“Yeah, we better quit,” joked her husband, who worked in various businesses before joining the Los Angeles County Area Agency on Aging in 1972.

But neither is likely to slow down.

Since retiring, the couple have also volunteered as docents for the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, bringing museum lessons to San Fernando Valley schools.

“Some people think retirement is a time to rest and relax,” Lillian Millard said. “We don’t think so.”

In San Francisco during the late 1940s and early ‘50s, the couple successfully campaigned to have a new school built in their neighborhood.

After moving to Studio City in 1952, Lillian Millard joined the PTA and then the North Hollywood Coordinating Council, which turned out to be the first step in a long climb to become president of the county Federation of Coordinating Councils in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In the late 1960s, she was chairwoman of the Southern California Conference on Youth, and part of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Children and Youth, as well as the White House Conference on Children and Youth. That volunteer work led to paid work in public service and the job as Los Angeles city director when CETA was created in 1973.

“It was very exciting and the entire staff was idealistic,” Lillian Millard said. The CETA program provided classroom and on-the-job training to help build work habits, and job opportunities for low-income people.

“Before CETA, federal money only went to South-Central and East Los Angeles,” she said. “But not places like Pacoima, Venice, Pico-Union. There were pockets of poverty across the city that were missed.”

CETA, which ended in 1982 and was replaced by the Job Training Partnership Act, had mixed results. Some cities misused the program, and there was no way of tracking the success of a recipient after their 90-day job placement had expired.

“It didn’t achieve everything we hoped it would achieve,” she said. “But there’s a lot of people who are working today because of the training they received from CETA.”

The reason the Millards have worked so hard in community service is simple, said Maury Millard, who volunteered with juvenile justice and probation programs before he joined the Los Angeles County Area Agency on Aging.

“In volunteering, to be honest, there’s an ego satisfaction you get out of it,” he said.

“There’s a tremendous satisfaction in being part of something that will provide an opportunity or some hope,” his wife added.

The couple plan to renew their wedding vows at a celebration in Tarzana on May 21.