Tyler Miller

My story’s very typical, I think, of most people – you grow up here, you leave and you go to ‘insert beautiful city’ for a few years, then you end up coming back. My beautiful city was St. Petersburg, Fla. I went to school for aviation, and in aviation you really go to the job. It’s such a small community, and then I chose to go into airport management, which is even smaller. So I worked at the St. Pete Clearwater International Airport. I met my wife in Florida, and we ended up getting married in Goshen. We came back about three years ago, and I’ve just been getting more and more involved in the community and seeing how much it’s changed in that short time I was gone and continues to grow.

An opportunity came for me to work at the South Bend International Airport. When I got the job, there was no question that we were going to live in Goshen and I was going to commute to South Bend. It was worth every minute of the commute because we love the community so much.

Two places in Goshen are near to my heart. The first is Art House, where I’m a member of the board. Art House’s mission is to provide a high-opportunity, low-barrier venue for artists. To be able to enable or support that just brings me a sense of fulfillment. The other: I married my wife in a hangar at the Goshen Municipal Airport. I flew in a little airplane. We got married on the apron on the ramp of the airport and we had our ceremony in the hangar. We had a fly-over after the ceremony. The Goshen airport is my hometown airport. It’s where my love for aviation was born and it’s where I married my wife. That airport will always have a special place in my heart as well.

My wife and I love to travel, but there’s no place like Goshen to be able to come home to and recharge and recenter yourself, whether it’s physically, emotionally, spiritually.

We’re just like a little oasis in the Midwest in so many ways. All you have to do is open up your calendar and see all the different things that are happening in Goshen, and how well they’re responded to. Also, to see how well the businesses and organizations understand the needs and wants of our citizens, and then how well in turn the citizens support the businesses and organizations.

There’s something authentic in that and really organic, almost, in the relationships the community has with its citizens and vice versa.