Born to Royal Harrison Eggert and Holly Berry Eggert, Joyce grew up in Roseville, CA with her younger sister Hallie, attending Roseville High School and later graduating from Sacramento State University. After college, Joyce worked as a journalist at The Roseville Press until one night when she happened to be at Harvey’s Top of the Wheel in Lake Tahoe with her best friend, Pat Mulligan. A man named Pat Milligan had a bloody nose and asked Joyce for a handkerchief. Patton Horner Milligan and Joyce were married soon after and stayed together until his passing in 2013.
After her marriage, Joyce moved to San Jose, CA working briefly at General Electric before starting a family and shifting her focus over to help run the family business, Milligan News Co. For several decades Joyce was also the book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury News and became good friends with many of the authors she interviewed, including the late, Maya Angelou.
A passionate reader and advocate of literacy and human rights, Joyce’s contributions to the San Jose Public Library in San Jose are vast. She also helped to run and encourage community events at the Milligan’s two bookstores for many years. Her involvement with publishers and authors ran deep. Joyce and Pat also made travel a priority and saw much of the world together until his passing. In later life, Joyce continued on, fiercely independent, and spent much of her time fundraising and supporting many local organizations, but her greatest passion became the scholarship program she set up after the passing of her sister, Hallie, in 2016…