In losing her daughter and her job, Jane Kaylor found what she called her "life's work."
Now she's readying to leave that work behind. After more than 32 years as president/CEO of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Greater Chattanooga, Kaylor is scheduled to retire in 2022 - likely during the year's second quarter and certainly with mixed emotions.
"I'm looking forward to not having all the responsibility," she said, "but it will be hard."
That's a feeling with which Kaylor is all too familiar. When leukemia claimed her 9-year-old daughter, Lori, in 1984, she joined - and later became president of - the Chattanooga-area chapter of Candlelighters, a support group for children with cancer.
That association led to a seat on the first area Ronald McDonald House Charities board. The board was looking for a CEO when Kaylor, who'd worked at TVA for a decade, was laid off in early 1989.
"I asked the board if they'd consider me," Kaylor recalled. "Dr. Gary Meredith, who was board president at the time, interviewed me at the Shoney's [restaurant] on Highway 153."
Staff Photo by Matt Hamilton / Jane Kaylor is photographed in front of the portrait of her daughter, Lori, at the Ronald McDonald House on Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021. Lori died at age 9 from leukemia.The board offered her the job and she accepted. She recalled that when she started on Sept. 1, 1989, there was no Ronald McDonald House, and the organization was $375,000 in debt.
Today, Kaylor said, the area Ronald McDonald House is endowed to the tune of $5 million and the 35,000-square-foot Ronald McDonald House, where families of patients at nearby Children's Hospital at Erlanger can stay, is worth about $4 million.
"This community has been so supportive," she said. "You can never underestimate the compassion in people.
"In the very beginning, we'd hear, 'Do they really need a Ronald McDonald House in Chattanooga? Do they know what they're doing?' Well, we figured it out through the years, and I know what it's like for those families. Every children's hospital needs a Ronald McDonald House," she said.
That Kaylor will be a tough act to follow is not lost on Kara L. West, who chairs both the area Ronald McDonald House board and its search committee.
"This has been Jane's calling," said West, the Chapter 13 Trustee for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court's Eastern District of Tennessee. "She has passion, talent, skills as a relationship-builder and she's an amazing fund-raiser. It's a tough thing to ask people for money.
"Jane has cherished the house, and is leaving it in a great situation. We want to continue this legacy of hers, but the House is bigger than one person. It's going to be hard to find a new CEO, but I feel hopeful when it comes to a new chapter for our future," West said.
Kaylor said she could recall "not a single time" at which she'd second-guessed taking the job, but acknowledged the weight of the pandemic.
"The pandemic helped," she said of her decision to retire. "It's everything changing, new guidelines almost every day. Six months ago, if you were exposed, you had to be out 24 days. Now it's 10. There's one set of rules for vaccinated people and another for non-vaccinated people.
"It's hard to be consistent with your staff with things changing so much," she said.
Kaylor said there have been "some really good ones and some really bad ones" among the countless families that have stayed at Chattanooga's Ronald McDonald House through the years. On rare occasions, she said, she and her staff have undertaken hospice care for children with terminal cancer.
"One little girl was from Ducktown, and there was just nothing available for her there," she said. "We were it. And another case was one where this was probably the most stable environment [the child] had ever had.
"It's hard on the staff, especially the younger staff, but it's really a beautiful experience," Kaylor said. "You see how courageous families are and what it means to those children to have everyone they love around them."
Indeed, love is at the heart of what Kaylor said she learned, and subsequently practiced, during her many years of caring for families of critically ill and injured children.
"You have to love people where you find them," she said. "You can't change them. You can't fix them. You've just got to love them where you find them."