Remembering our co-worker, Mary Jane Leader
Mary Jane Leader
Mary Jane Leader, wife of the late Pennsylvania Gov. George M. Leader, helped her husband found Country Meadows Retirement Communities. She also served many years as a Nursing Home Administrator with the couple’s first retirement venture, Leader Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, Inc.
Country Meadows President & CEO Michael Leader recalls, “In the days when Dad was running Leader Nursing & Rehab, he needed an administrator at our first community. Mother had no experience, but he knew that he could trust her; she had great judgment and she loved people.”
Country Meadows co-founder Mary Jane Leader at her desk as a Nursing Home Administrator.
When the Leader family sold Leader Nursing & Rehabilitation, Inc., Gov. and Mrs. Leader founded Country Meadows. Mrs. Leader worked as Nursing Home Administrator for the nursing and rehabilitation center at Country Meadows of South Hills near Pittsburgh. Later, after seeing her husband’s interior design skills, she led the design team at the Home Office in Hershey.
“Mrs. Leader loved her work with the design group, and when you look around a CM property, you can see her touches still are very important,” says former co-worker Henri Lively.
“I believe that Mrs. Leader’s vision for our communities continues. They are warm and inviting and that is what she always strived to create. You get a homelike feeling you get when you walk into a Country Meadows campus,” adds co-worker, Treva Kilpatrick.
“She was the ultimate in walk-around management. She would talk to residents and co-workers and could get information no one else could just by listening. She would bring that information back to the dinner table to my father and in that way, helped shape care and programs for our residents and made decisions,” says Leader’s daughter, Jane Leader Janeczek. “She was very quiet and subtle, but was a powerful influence in the way the culture at Country Meadows developed.”
Kilpatrick concludes, “She was truly poised and grace. God stopped making people like that— they are our antiques, they’re one of a kind.”