Yes, he was a PR guy for an important health care institution in Springfield, the one that operates Springfield Memorial Hospital and affiliated hospitals in Jacksonville, Decatur, Taylorville and Lincoln. But Leathers, a Chatham resident who died at 61 on Aug. 3 from cardiovascular problems, was more than your average PR guy.
He was more helpful than most in his line of work. He was both kind and well-connected at Memorial. Always professional. Knowledgeable but not boastful. He had a newsman’s heart, and the time he spent as a journalist made it easier for him to empathize with the role of the media and easier to translate the language of health care for the general public.
The respect Leathers earned over the years inside Memorial – a nonprofit organization with more than $2 billion in assets, $1 billion in annual revenues, and one of the largest employers in the region – resulted in more Memorial officials going on-the-record with the press. That meant the general public learned more about the impact and importance of health care in central Illinois because of him.
“He was very patient, very kind,” Memorial Health Chief Executive Officer Ed Curtis said of Leathers, whom Curtis worked with during Leathers’ entire tenure at the organization. “And he loved Memorial and was very proud of Memorial. He embodied our value of integrity in all of his work. He served us very well.”
Leathers, whose survivors included his wife, Tammy, and son, Geoff Leathers of Chicago, was a playwright in his spare time. According to his obituary, his plays and sketches have been performed at Chicago’s Second City, Heartland Theatre Company in Normal, Monroe Actors Stage Company in Waterloo, Iowa, and Baldwin Theatre in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Before he joined Memorial, he worked as a reporter for the Alton Telegraph and was editor of Illinois Baptist, a newspaper covering Southern Baptist congregations across Illinois.
Leathers’ story of how he lost his job at Illinois Baptist after he reported the arrest and charging of a Baptist minister with sexually abusing girls in Olney was part of articles by Texas newspapers and the New York Times about the way Southern Baptist churches covered up pastors’ abuse of children.
The minister was convicted, served time in prison and later “returned to the pulpit in a series of Baptist churches nearby,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in February 2019.
Amelia Benner, Memorial Health communications editor and a former journalist, said she enjoyed sitting near Leathers in Memorial’s communications and marketing department, where he worked as a media and public relations consultant.
“He just had such a great sense of humor and was always optimistic,” she said.
Benner said she and Leathers “leafed through” Illinois Times’ “REMEMBERING” issue a few Decembers ago. He told Benner, “‘If I die while I’m still working here, I want you to write one of these for me.’”
Here are a few paragraphs from what Benner wrote as a tribute to Leathers:
“You said you wanted your obituary to be funny and irreverent, not sentimental.
“It was an easy promise to make because I thought I’d never have to do it. But you died too soon, and now I must fulfill that promise – although nothing about this seems funny.
“Honestly, Michael, you left your co-workers in the lurch. Who else had such an encyclopedic knowledge of the Associated Press stylebook? Who could argue so eloquently about the superiority of Star Trek to Star Wars? Or deploy a sly one-liner with such a gleam in your eye.
“You may have spent the past few decades as a ‘PR guy,’ but you never stopped being a reporter at heart. You had a reverence for the transformative power of journalism, even in an era when that kind of idealism could seem quaint. You were passionate about the theater and had a side career as a playwright. And you loved your family above all – Tammy, who picked out your ties, and Geoff, who shared your sense of humor.
“Michael, I feel myself veering into the kind of sentiment you didn’t want. So, to finish: You have proven to be irreplaceable, and it was very inconsiderate of you to die.”
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer at Illinois Times and worked with Michael Leathers as a fellow Memorial employee for several months in 2020. Olsen can be reached at [email protected], 217-679-7810 or twitter.com/DeanOlsenIT.
