In 2011, Jane Comer—activist, entrepreneur, and proud grandmother—began to experience tremors in her hands. On the advice of her friend, Comer made an appointment with UAB Medicine and received a stunning diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease.

“Total surprise,” Comer recalls, noting that she had no family history of the illness. “I hardly knew what it was.”

Soon afterward, she made one of the largest individual contributions in the history of the UAB Department of Neurology: an anonymous $2 million gift to accelerate translational research into Parkinson’s.

“I didn’t want to advertise it,” Comer says of her gift, which she recently decided to make public in order to encourage others to invest in Parkinson’s research. “I wanted to give a lump sum that made a difference, not spread it all out.”

According to David Standaert, M.D., Ph.D., John N. Whitaker Professor and Chair of the UAB Department of Neurology, Comer has certainly made a difference. Thanks in part to her support, UAB currently houses a National Institutes of Health Udall Center, several large programs funded by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s Consortium, and projects supported by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson Research and the American Parkinson Disease Association, among many others.

“Jane Comer was an early investor in the development of UAB’s Parkinson research programs, and her commitment enabled us to become one of the leading PD research centers in the world,” Standaert says. “Since her commitment in 2013, UAB has received more than $74 million dollars in NIH funding related to Parkinson research, an impressive return on the investment made by Mrs. Comer and others in our community. Her support was critical for the success we have achieved, and for the ongoing efforts to develop better treatments and cures for Parkinson disease.”

Philanthropy runs in Comer’s blood. Her father, EBSCO founder Elton B. Stephens, was not only one of Alabama’s most successful businessmen, but also one of its most generous civic leaders and patrons of the arts. Like so many other Birmingham residents, Comer sees her parents’ living legacy of philanthropy everywhere; even her current physician received the Alys Robinson Stephens Piano Prize during his time at Birmingham-Southern College.

“My father was a philanthropist—that’s the way he was made,” Comer says. “He supported everybody in the family. I saw that. It was his way of saying ‘I love you’ and ‘Thank you,’ because he was not very good at saying things like that. It rubbed off on me a lot.”

But Comer has done more than carry on her father’s legacy; she’s blazed trails for countless others in Birmingham and beyond. After decades of service on the boards of various civic organizations, Comer attended Gloria Steinem’s 75th birthday party in 2009, where the famed feminist activist and journalist charged attendees to “commit one outrageous act in the cause of simple justice.”

Within a year, Comer cofounded GirlSpring Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to informing and empowering girls and young women.

The nonprofit “started out as a woman’s organization,” Comer says, “but I changed it to [ages 9-18]. Nine, because a girl can get pregnant at nine, and that is scary. So you want your child to know that that can happen to them. What we do is give them information. We don’t recommend anything—we just give them honest-to-God information from psychologists, teachers, writers, et cetera.”

That same year, Comer made a historic $5 million gift to the Alys Stephens Center to establish ArtPlay, which continues to educate and inspire learners of all ages, skill levels, and incomes in the community.

“I had a certain thing I wanted to teach children, and that is for them to do their own thing…and not be dependent on the teacher,” she says.

Comer, who returned to college at age 45 to earn her bachelor’s in art history, knows something about doing her own thing. After completing her degree, Comer decided to pursue what she calls her real love: entrepreneurship. Combining her passions for art and gardening, she opened her “garden boutique,” The Elegant Earth, in the mid-’80s. She still smiles at the memory of gathering inventory, a mixture of antique and modern outdoor decor, in San Francisco and France. For Comer, who collects goat-related artwork—“One more weird thing about Jane,” she says with a laugh—the crown jewel was a life-size faience goat sculpture.

Whether fostering creativity through ArtPlay, raising awareness through GirlSpring, or following her unique muse in business, Comer has spent her entire adult life encouraging original thinking.

“Entrepreneurship is doing something no one else has done,” she says. “It’s not easy to find people like that.”

Naturally, that encouragement extends to Comer’s own family. Asked where her children—including her son Jason, who spent a decade developing Alys Beach in the Florida Panhandle—get their entrepreneurial instincts from, she quips, “Well, they didn’t get it from their dad.”

More than a decade after her Parkinson’s diagnosis, Comer refuses to be bored. When she isn’t traveling in her RV, she remains active with GirlSpring and ArtPlay, as well as dabbling in creative writing. While Comer mostly writes children’s books—stories like Samson’s Adventure, Charlie and the Robot, and Miss Hopalong’s Garden were made specifically for her grandchildren—she’s also penned one story for adults.

Written around the time of her diagnosis, “The Tremor” concerns a grand wedding party between two prominent families, complete with black tie attire, flowing champagne, and an overqualified wedding band: the Rolling Stones. Then, in an instant, everything changes, as an earthquake begins to topple champagne flutes and spark a panic.

“They begin to feel trembling, and then it gets a little bit worse, and worse, and worse,” Comer says. “People flood outside trying to get out. But there is a star in the sky, and when you look up at that star, you believe that everything is going to be all right.”

Undaunted by Parkinson’s, Jane Comer continues to travel by the light of her own star. And through her historic generosity, she is empowering countless others to follow their own paths, wherever they may lead.

--Written by Walt Lewellyn