By Victor Greto
It’s not easy being Terry Trief-Sherman. Nor is it easy being yourself around her.
Her passion for her adopted city, Pembroke Pines, is overwhelming.
A 74-year-old community activist known to almost everyone in southwest Broward County simply as Terry T, she is founder and director of a charitable civic pride group, Our Part of the Woods, and nearly a dozen other organizations.
Her One More Step Charity/Kommitted to Kidz gives thousands of dollars each year to her adopted city of Pembroke Pines.
Since moving to the Grand Palms development just west of Interstate 75 more than six years ago, she has become as well known as any elected official.
She’s a ubiquitous presence at City Commission meetings, enthusiastically reading political doggerel to the commissioners to get her point across, prefacing each of her poems or statements with, “I’m Terry T. Sherman, from beautiful Grand Palms in beautiful Pembroke Pines,” as if reciting a mantra or a blessing.
Mayor Alex Fekete calls her “an adorable extreme” who can be “very persuasive. She has very strong convictions. She carries everything through to the end. She’s definitely a very unique part of Pembroke Pines. There’s not many like Terry T.”
“I am now like the company dog at City Council meetings,” Terry T says. “They pat my head, and I wag my tail.”
You can’t miss her at the meetings. At 6 feet tall, she towers over most of the commissioners.
And those clothes. A former designer of high-fashion clothing with Don Sherman, her husband of nearly five decades, she dresses for all occasions.
And anything goes, from layered leather skirts, to an explorer outfit with pith helmet, to a relatively conservative blouse and skirt crawling with pins in the shapes of bugs and small animals.
Once she has your attention, it’s easy to forget your own opinions, passions and point of view.
“It’s very difficult to be Terry T,” she says. “When anyone is as positive as I am, you get labeled erroneously as a control freak or an egotist; words that possibly you can attribute to me.
`That’s the point’
“But that’s not the sum of me,” she continues. “If you get to know me, I’m not an egotist. I’m aware of my showboating. But it gets my point across. And that’s the point.”
It works, but it wasn’t always the point.
During her early years, Terry Trief just wanted to sing and dance. Born in 1926 to Jewish immigrant parents, she grew up relatively wealthy on Grand Street in New York City.
She was a self-described “child prodigy,” and the only girl in a family with four brothers.
She sang on the Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour at age 5 or 6, she says, and stayed a singer until the age of 16. Then, she said, “I screeched myself into oblivion” after getting tonsillitis.
She continued to dance, however, while attending Hunter College on Park Avenue.
With all the guys at war, she liked to dress in pants, shirt and tie, hat and pipe and play the man.
“I affected the appurtenance of a young man with partners,” she says, but insists it all went into her burgeoning forceful personality. “I was always a powerful woman, a leader of the pack. All of this simply helped create the individual I was to become.”
After college, “my life was concerned with how I was going to enter into the world of commerce.”
She was always interested in what she calls “the individuality of fashion,” but it wasn’t until she met Don Sherman at the Catskills in 1952 that she actually went into business as a fashion designer.
She and her husband had two children and started Fine and Fancy Kouture in Brooklyn.
She refuses to talk about any more of her “checkered career” before she came to Pembroke Pines in the early 1990s.
“That’s my New York life,” she says defiantly. “Why talk about things that are very deep in one’s past if it doesn’t advance a spiritual value, which is all I’m concerned with at this point?”
They sold their business in 1992 and left New York “because of four letters: s-n-o-w. I never want to see any more snow.”
Fekete remembers his first “impressive contact” with Terry T.
It involved her proposal for a Dream Park, a Greenwich Village-like 6-acre space, with tree-lined walkways, outdoor stages for any musician to play, and Hyde Park-like soapboxes so people could speak their minds like in London.
“She presented some elaborate drawings and convinced the commission to go forward with it. We supported it, but her plans were elaborate to the tune of $3 [million] to $4 million, so we scaled the project back,” Fekete says.
“As long as I’m able to speak, the dream lives on,” Terry T says, lamenting that commissioners have since put hockey rinks on three of her park’s six acres.
She shivers at the idea of running for political office to effect change. “Why would I step down from being president of Our Part of the Woods to being mayor of Pembroke Pines? I am not political but politic; firm, friendly, keeping on the track of gentility. Politics is about winning. I just want people to understand my position.”
Most understand the positive impact of her charity work.
Our Part of the Woods’ charitable arm, One More Step Charity/Kommitted to Kidz, gets much of its money in annual galas and sporadic corporate contributions.
According to Harvey J. Broman, a child psychologist and chairman of One More Step, when the Our Part of the Woods gala began in 1996, the organization raised $22,000; it raised $50,000 in 1997, $80,000 in 1998, and $82,000 in 1999. The next gala is scheduled for Dec. 2.
“Since 1996,” Broman says, “we’ve given out money to virtually every school in Pembroke Pines; funds to assist kids that have disadvantages. The idea is to keep them in step with their peers. We began by funding two programs at Silver Trail Middle School, including 20 scholarships for those that need tutoring in math and reading. We also gave out scholarships to Flanagan [high school] seniors; in the last two years, we’ve given out 15 $1,000 scholarships. This year, we’re giving out eight. We have funded the autistic, deaf and learning-disabled children programs in almost every school to purchase books and materials and equipment.”
Boundless energy
According to Broman and Terry T, it doesn’t stop there.
Nor does Terry T.
She is a qualified teacher for Literacy Volunteers of America; founder of the Spanish Club of Pembroke Pines; she’s a founding member of the Southwest Senior Focal Point Center; she initiated the Adopt-A-Highway program west of I-75; she’s a board member of the Economic Development Board of Pembroke Pines; and she created the “Meeting of the Minds,” a creative think tank of school principals and activists to help decide where her charity’s money will go; and she has been recently nominated to enter the Broward County Senior Hall of Fame.
She also founded and chaired the first Pembroke Pines Arts and Cultural committee in 1996, but resigned after only a month when city commissioners refused to grant her the title of “director.”
The commission said it would have to pay her to have such a title. Terry T says she wanted it so she could legitimately “speak on the level of other directors of arts committees all over the country. But that went down in flames.”
Broman describes her with: “magnanimous and lollapalooza. She’s an extraordinary event, dynamic, fixated, dedicated, and gives obsessively of her time.”
Pembroke Pines Vice Mayor Susan Katz, a longtime neighbor of Terry T’s, says “she’s an incredible person because, though a senior citizen, she has more energy than most people of any age.
“There are some who can do things quietly. But she has an intense personality. She’s very focused, and she really believes in what she’s doing, and what she’s doing is a very good thing.”
Terry T herself seems intensely happy, if not content to rest on her laurels. “I don’t know anyone happier than me. I’m 74, with two sons, a husband to die for, and a mission in life. The only thing I can’t find is a good old-fashioned malted milk.”