Jan was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and earned her first nursing degree from Evangelical Deaconess Hospital along the shores of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee.
Shortly after graduating from Deaconess, the petite emerald-eyed auburn-haired beauty eloped with a young psychiatrist with maverick ideas, Hugh D. Riordan, who was on his way to an internship at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, Kansas. En route to Kansas, Jan and Hugh were married in a small town in Iowa in the back of a TV store by the owner, who doubled as the town’s justice of the peace.
Jan and Hugh reared six children in Wichita, for the most part on a three-acre spread on Elmwood Drive. On a given summer Saturday in the late 1960s, Jan might go to the beauty parlor in the morning, and then pile her brood into the blue Bonneville station wagon to go swimming at the “Y” on the south side of town. In 100-degree weather, Jan would swim a regal breaststroke with her head (and her hair-sprayed and bobby-pinned up-do) well above the water. Meanwhile, her noisy children splashed around her.
Upon returning to Elmwood Drive, Jan would send the kids outside with watermelon slices and, after they were done with a seed-spitting contest, herd them to the Back of the House to watch TV so she could prepare beef bourguignon for an adult dinner party of eight at her house that evening. (Hugh would make dessert: inevitably, banana flambe).
She also found time for an active role in the Kansas League of Women Voters, and trained to get her pilot’s license. She was a member of the 99s, the international organization of women pilots, having performed her first solo flight in a six-seater Cessna while pregnant with twins.
Jan was a pioneering proponent for breastfeeding when the prevailing culture favored bottle feeding for infants. A founding member of the Kansas chapter of La Leche League International, then a nascent organization, Jan hosted meetings in the family living room.
Jan was a generous but firm matriarch who gave each of her children a gentle but emphatic push out of the nest when she felt it was time for them to fly. She made it clear she wanted her children to live in far-flung and interesting places so that she could visit. They made good on her wishes.
Once the last of her children (the twins) entered elementary school, Jan earned a B.S.N. from Kansas Newman then a master’s in nursing from Wichita State University. She would continue on to earn her doctorate from Oklahoma State University.
As her children grew, and Hugh was busy building what is now the Riordan Clinic, Jan’s professional career flourished. She taught college courses at St. Mary of the Plains and was a nurse researcher at St. Joseph Medical Center. Ultimately, she became a tenured professor in nursing at Wichita State University, where she served on the faculty for 23 years before retiring in 2010. She was Professor Emerita of the School of Nursing at the time of her death.
Jan was the founding editor and co-author of five editions of Breastfeeding and Human Lactation, the leading textbook on human lactation which is often referred to as “the bible of breastfeeding.” In addition to authoring five other books, Jan was one of the founders of the
International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners (IBLCE) and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.
Jan was a sought-after speaker and spoke dozens of times internationally. Given her authority in the field and her warm personality, Jan enjoyed a bit of a rock star status in the lactation world. In 2009 at a convention hall in Nagoya, Japan, she addressed 2000 people, with nursing students eagerly lining up afterward to have her sign her textbooks.
From her base at WSU, Jan also was a pioneer in online learning. Beginning in the early days of the Internet, she was one of the first professors in any field to offer accredited online university courses, which benefitted thousands of students around the world, many of whom would not otherwise have had access to such learning opportunities.
A professorship was endowed at WSU in 2007 to honor Jan’s contributions to nursing education. The Janice M. Riordan Distinguished Professorship in Maternal Child Health, with its focus on breastfeeding education and research, was hailed by the university as the first of its kind in a school of nursing.
As a grandmother, Jan’s disciplinarian nature (chores every Saturday, no junk food in the house) softened. Her grandchildren remember that she always had the fancy bottled root beer and frozen mac and cheese on hand, took them to the Gap to buy the good jeans, brought them along as traveling companions to France and Hawaii and beyond, and unfailingly sent cards, check enclosed, for every birthday.
When Jan and Hugh moved lakeside to Portwest Circle in Wichita, just about every warm day before sunset Jan would swim (now without hairspray or bobby pins, head fully submerged) across and back what in the old days was called Crystal Lake.
After Hugh passed away, Jan was courted by a longtime family friend, Donald Younglund. Don and Jan enjoyed a lovely December-December romance. They traveled widely, to Europe, the Amazon, and Honolulu. They were known to break out in pitch perfect harmony singing “Over the Rainbow.”
Jan is survived by six children, two daughters-in-law and one son-in-law: Michael of Paris, France; Neil of Westlake, Texas, and Panama City, Panama; Shirley of Grapevine, Texas; Teresa of Princeton, New Jersey; Renee and Donald Olmstead of Colorado Springs, Colorado; Quinn and Rika of Tokyo, Japan, and Honolulu; and Brian of Rome, Italy, and Honolulu.
Jan also is survived by three nieces (Beth Lueck and Lisa Muldowney of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, and Lori Inman of Milwaukee, Wisconsin), two nephews (Lee Riordan and Steve Riordan of Milwaukee) and 12 grandchildren: Chloe, Michaela, Brinn, Elliott, Takuma, Tierney, Damaris, Lydia, Tanya, Savannah, Alexis, and Perle.
Jan is predeceased by her mother, Pearl Radke, her father, Harold Brick, her step-father, Edwin Radke, her sister and brother-in-law Joan and Pete Gerhart, her brother Stephen Brick, and her step brothers Lester and Robert Radke.
A musical memorial service in Jan’s honor will be held at 11:00 am on Saturday, November 3rd at University Congregational Church in Wichita. Donations in Jan’s memory can be made to La Leche League International at https://www.llli.org/support-us/.
