Richard Boswell thinks he can salvage LakeView Manor, Lawrence’s oldest and most maligned nursing home.

“I’ve done this before,” said Boswell, LakeView Manor’s administrator since August 2001. “It’s sort of a specialty of mine.”

He’s impressed Ella Calderwood, a Lawrence retiree who stops by LakeView Manor every day to check on a friend. Calderwood says the easy-going Boswell is working wonders.

“I have no complaints,” she said. “The help is excellent. And if something isn’t right, it’s corrected right away. The care is good.”

Julia Hall, a nurse’s aide for the past 11 years at LakeView Manor, 3015 W. 31st St., said conditions there have never been better.

“It used to be nothing but stress here all the time — corporate people coming in, putting pressure on you,” she said. “But it’s not like that now. This is a nice place to work.”

It hasn’t always been so.

State inspectors have cited LakeView Manor and its predecessors — Cherry Manor, then Colonial Manor — many times for poor care.

During a survey in early 2000, Kansas Department of Health and Environment cited the home for 30 deficiencies, resulting in fines and a ban on new admissions. In 2001, the facility was fined $7,000.

“When I first got here, I’d meet people on the street, and everybody was real friendly,” Boswell said. “But when they found out what I was here for, they’d go ‘Ugh’ and then they’d say something like, ‘I hear that’s not a very nice place.’ That’s how bad it was.”

It got worse. Beverly Healthcare, the industry giant that ran the 68-bed home for 20 years, decided in October 2001 not to renew its lease, which expired Dec. 31, 2001.

LakeView Manor Executive Director Richard Boswell pushes manor resident Jean Mumford down the hallway to the home's commons area. Boswell is working to turn the manor around after years of substandard evaluations.

At the time, Boswell had been at LakeView Manor for two months.

“They offered to transfer me,” Boswell said. “But my wife and I like Lawrence. We didn’t want to move. We want to retire here.”

The building’s owners, Topeka accountant Charles Pomeroy Sr. and his son Charles Pomeroy Jr., asked Boswell to stay.

“Everything happened on such short notice, we had two choices,” said the younger Pomeroy. “We could either close it down, abandon the residents and the staff, and have an empty building on our hands, or we could try to keep it going. We chose the latter.”

Pomeroy said he and his father gave Boswell freedom to turn LakeView Manor around.

“It’s been tough, but he’s made it a better place,” Pomeroy said.

Last year, LakeView Manor passed its annual inspection — its first with Boswell at the helm — with just three deficiencies.

“This appears to be a facility that’s shown marked improvement,” KDHE spokeswoman Sharon Watson said.

Guiding principle

He said his approach to better care was based on a single guiding principle: Be good to your workers, and they’ll be good to you.

“When I got here, the whole nursing staff was ‘agency,'” he said, meaning the home was staffed with nurses from employment agencies that specialize in health care workers.

“Today … we haven’t had any ‘agency’ in probably six months,” Boswell said.

Donnette Holloway, LakeView Manor’s director of social services for the past five months, said Boswell was different from most nursing home administrators.

“He’s very approachable,” she said. “He’s not intimidating. You don’t have to be a department head to talk to him — anybody can talk to him.”

There’s nothing fancy about LakeView Manor. The floors are linoleum; the walls are plain.

Almost all of the residents rely on Medicaid to pay their bills.

Boswell doesn’t mind.

“I don’t come from a rich family,” he said. “I come from a family of workers. I grew up poor. I’m here to help the little guy.”

Graduating from Central Missouri State University in 1956, Boswell said he worked his way up the management ladders at Trans World Airlines and then Marriott.

“I did real well,” he said. “But I always felt like something was missing. I didn’t feel like I was making a difference.”

For a change, he tried managing a nursing home. “All of sudden, I felt like I was doing something,” he said. “I was helping people.”

Boswell said that in the past 24 years he’s managed homes — new and old, large and small — in Missouri, Wisconsin, Virginia, Indiana, Texas and Montana.

“This is a big industry,” Boswell said, explaining his multiple moves. “Word gets out, and people call and say, ‘What can I do to get you to move here?’ So, really, I’ve just gone where I’m needed.”

KDHE’s Watson said Boswell arrived with “no major deficiencies” on his record. He also passed a state-required KBI background check.

Boswell is 72, but he says he’s in no hurry to retire anytime soon. He said his next challenge at LakeView Manor is to attract more residents.

Fifteen months ago, LakeView Manor had 50 residents; today, it has 41.

“I’m trying to build a better census,” he said.

That won’t happen anytime soon, said Margaret Farley, a Lawrence attorney and past president of Kansas Advocates for Better Care.

“It’s going to take time for people to recognize that things have changed out there because they had such a bad reputation for so long,” Farley said.

Boswell said he’d be patient.

“Sooner or later, the word will get out,” he said.