Zetta Mae Miller, 67, a former Robbins community leader and City Colleges nursing professor, died Sunday, Jan. 20, in St. James Hospital and Health Centers in Chicago Heights of pneumonia. Born in Robbins, Mrs. Miller returned to the southwest suburb to work in health services and education after serving in the Army and earning her college degrees. “She just felt there was a need for black professionals to continue to live in Robbins even when they didn’t have to,” said her friend and colleague Shirley Stanton, who worked for more than two decades with Mrs. Miller at Kennedy-King College in Chicago. “Truly she could have lived anywhere she wanted to, but Robbins was really her home.” Mrs. Miller, who retired in 2000, worked as a professor for 29 years at Kennedy-King College after earning a bachelor’s degree in nursing science from the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago and a master’s degree in public health nursing from Boston University. Mrs. Miller helped organize a nursing service in the 1970s in Robbins in which nurses visited residents in their homes, Blanton said, and she helped the village obtain the services of its first federally funded physician. During her career, she once headed the college’s nursing department and derived great satisfaction from teaching, friends said. “She was a very loving and compassionate person who called her nursing students `baby,’ and made them feel like they could do anything,” Blanton said. “At the blackboard, she could just teach off the top of her head. She could teach like she was telling a story.” Mrs. Miller also was a certified small aircraft pilot. She was a member of New Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, where she sang in the church’s junior choir. Survivors include her daughter, Selma ; a son, Samuel; a sister, Georgella Jameson-Jacques; and a brother, Richard Jameson. Services were held in Robbins.
