Leonore Meyer, who passed away on Thursday Feb 11th at the age of 94, lived at Kendal since 2006.  She was born at home in the Bronx, the 4th of 4 daughters of a working class family. Her parents emigrated to the United States from Poland near the turn of the 20th Century. As a young girl, Leonore often went to the movies, including to see The Wizard of Oz on opening day when it came out in 1939. That film made her a life-long Judy Garland fan. In high school, she snuck out of school one day to take the subway downtown to hear a very young Frank Sinatra sing at the Paramount Theater in Times Square. 

Leonore was the only one of her family to attend college. Her father agreed to let her go to Hunter College because, as she was fond of telling her children and her grandchildren, the tuition was only $8 per semester.  She studied psychology and sang in the chorus at Hunter, performing a solo of Gershwin’s “Summertime” for the entire school. After college, Leonore worked for 6 years as an EEG technician at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City.  In the early 1950’s she moved to San Francisco, working as a receptionist and secretary at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in a psychiatry clinic. She also sang with the San Francisco Bach Choir and the chorus of the California Labor School, a communist organization. Questioned by the FBI during the McCarthy era, she refused to reveal the names of her friends and colleagues in the communist party.  She often told the story of how, several years after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing in 1953, she met their young sons at an event in the Catskills.  She spoke of the searing memory of seeing these sweet innocent boys sitting around a campfire and thinking how terribly sad it was that they had been orphaned by the state.

She was an avid singer, a painter and photographer, a lover of both classical and popular music of her youth and had a particular love of movies, which she brought to her role as head of the movie committee at Kendal, a job she took with great seriousness and devotion.  Rare it was that the subject of a movie came up in conversation that she couldn’t cite the director and the cast, and probably the marital history of the stars in it.  And if it was an older movie, she’d be able to describe when she first saw it and in what theater. 

After returning to New York in 1959, Leonore worked as the assistant to the Director of The New York Psychoanalytic Association where she met her husband, Buddy Meyer in February of 1961.  They were married only 4 months after their first meeting.  She described her move back to New York as the best decision she ever made because it was there that she met Buddy, the love of her life. Buddy was a psychoanalyst 16 years her senior, and a widower with two children, Nicholas and Constance.   After their marriage, Leonore moved in with Buddy and his children to their brownstone on 62nd Street in Manhattan, where she lived for the next 46 years.  They had two children – Juliette and Deborah, born in 1962 and 1963.  Buddy passed away in 1988 but Leonore continued to live in their home in Manhattan, often traveling to California to visit Nick and Constance and their families and taking the train from Manhattan every Tuesday to visit her daughter Juliette and her family in Westchester. 

In the 2000s, Leonore came to feel isolated and lonely living alone in Manhattan.  At the urging of her children, she reluctantly decided to move into Kendal on a trial basis.  She took an apartment in Adirondack and shortly after her arrival, on her way to lunch, she ran into Joyce Buck, a friend from Hunter College whom she had not seen since college.  This connection was pivotal in her decision to stay at Kendal.  Over time, she became an integral part of Kendal and counted among her many friends both other residents as well as many staff members, all of whom she treated with warmth and kindness and who in turn, came to love and appreciate her. Whenever family came to visit her at Kendal and accompanied her to lunch or dinner, there would not be a single person she passed in the hallway whom she did not stop to greet and introduce her family to.  

Her time at Kendal was in many ways a new beginning for Leonore, late in life,  that provided much needed meaning and engagement for her.  In addition to her role as head of the movie committee, she participated in and helped out with the annual art show, displaying photos she took at her seaside home in Provincetown, a place where she spent many happy summers with her family.  As long time president of Adirondack, she proudly attended resident council meetings as representative of the Adirondack residents.  

Her many years at Kendal brought her immense happiness.   She considered Kendal her beloved home.