By HARRIET PROTHRO PENROD
From time to time, I’ll find myself driving past the house I grew up in on Levin Lane. 510 Levin Lane, to be exact. It’s a cul-de-sac, the perfect setup for kids to play in the street. I’ll take a few spins around the street – driving slowly as I pass by the house down on the right where my cousins grew up. Our house was the second from the end on the left and across the street – at the corner of Horton and Levin Lane – was where one of my closest childhood friends lived.
To this day, if you mention my name to John George, he’ll tell you I was the one who taught him to tie his shoes.
“You really remember that?” I ask him when we meet for lunch in a conference room at the Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana.
“Yes,” he says with a smile. “You were five years old and I was six.”
He even remembers the room in our house where I taught him to tie his shoes. John also remembers finding my brother Craig at two years old pushing our dad’s lawn mower at the end of the cul-de-sac early one morning wearing nothing but a diaper.
What I remember is playing “Cowboys and Indians” – decked out with guns and holsters – and lying under the magnolia tree in the next-door neighbor’s yard after we had been defeated by the Indians.
My mother used to love to tell the story of when I came into the house crying and said, “John hit me back.”
Back then, if my parents weren’t home, they were probably across the street at Ruby and Fisher George’s house playing bridge.
That was almost 60 years ago.
All of these memories come flooding back as soon as I’m greeted by John George, the president and CEO of BRF – founded in 1986 as the Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana. Now known as BRF (for Building our Region’s Future), it is an innovative economic development organization establishing North Louisiana as a preferred destination for high-growth businesses through its programs and initiatives.
As president and CEO, George has led the organization through an expansion of programs to include the Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program (EAP), Envision Research, the Center for Molecular Imaging and Therapy (CMIT), the Digital Media Institute (DMI), Shreveport Next, the New Louisiana Angel Funds 1 and 2 (NLAF) and ownership and operation of University Health System – the region’s safety net healthcare system and clinical partner of LSU Medical School in Shreveport.
The journey from Levin Lane to the massive campus of BRF’s headquarters in its InterTech I facility on the Shreveport Healthcare and Development Corridor has been an interesting one for John Fisher George Jr., M.D.
I hadn’t seen John in years and caught up with him for a recent visit. Instead of going out to eat, he had lunch brought in and we talked for hours. He’s very busy – and was heading to Washington, D.C. Mardi Gras in a few days – but he would cancel what he had planned for this day (“for the person who taught me how to tie my shoes”) and we spent lunch and most of the afternoon catching up.
For someone who “always wanted to be a doctor,” George took a little different route to get there.
While at LSU in Baton Rouge – where he really enjoyed college life for three years – George realized he wasn’t going to get into medical school and, at the urging of his mother, came back to Shreveport and got his degree in geology from Centenary.
“My dad wanted me to be a geologist,” he said.
After 10 years — at the age of 29 — George went to medical school. By that time, he was married and had the first of his four sons.
After graduating from medical school (in internal medicine), he got into the management side of medicine by co-founding and leading the development of LifeCare Management Service, a long-term acute care hospital system serving patients with a length of stay greater than 25 days. Through hospital startups and acquisitions spearheaded by George, LifeCare owned and operated 20 hospitals in nine states – with 3,000 employees with annual revenues of $300 million.
After LifeCare Management was purchased by the Carlyle Group in 2005, George started G6 Management, a private investment and capital management firm.
With his expertise in business development, investment management, and clinical management, George was the logical person to lead BRF. Since he became president and CEO, BRF led the University Health System’s hospitals through a financial turnaround and, in 2018, transitioned them to Ochsner Health System – the largest healthcare system in the state.
BRF’s mission to diversify and grow our region’s economy is something that hits home for George, who was born and raised in Shreveport and wants to see his hometown thrive. Whether he is talking about the entrepreneurship program, the Biotechnology Magnet Academy at Southwood High School, the Digital Media Institute (which is now offering online classes to students in all 50 states), strides being made in attracting businesses to the area, or any of the many aspects of BRF’s mission, George sees endless possibilities for economic growth in this part of the state.
He’s as busy as he’s ever been and not slowing down anytime soon.
“I love what I’m doing,” says George. “I grew up here. This place was really good to me. Why wouldn’t I want it to be as good for someone else?”
Contact Harriet at sbjharriet@gmail.com