Leslie Greene Bowman, AS '80M, had a vision of a family motoring down Delaware's Kennett Pike and, when they spotted the Winterthur Museum sign, all the children would jump up and down in the back seats calling out, "Mommy, Daddy, Let's go to Winterthur!"

It was a real stretch because founder Henry Francis du Pont didn't even allow children inside when Winterthur opened to the public in 1951, but children's attendance has more than doubled since Bowman took over as Winterthur director four years ago.

They come for family days, special tours for tykes, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on its restaurant menu and the popular three-acre Enchanted Woods children's garden.

In the four years since Bowman took over, Winterthur has quietly repackaged itself as family friendly. Even the name has changed from the Winterthur Museum and Gardens to Winterthur, An American Country Estate.

Winterthur employs more than 400 people and has its own train station, post office, public safety force and fire department. Bowman jokes that she could actually be the mayor of Winterthur.

When she was named director and CEO in 1999, Bowman said she felt like she'd grabbed the brass ring on the carousel. She had her ticket punched in all the right places when former director Dwight P. Lanmon announced his impending retirement: She was a graduate of UD's Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, author of two books on the decorative arts, had 17 years of curatorial experience and some managerial experience at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and she had run the smaller National Museum of Wildlife Art in Wyoming for more than a year.

Bowman had experience dealing with a museum board. She had a curatorial background. She had brought a large show to L.A. And, she knew all the curlicues of Winterthur--a museum housed in historic buildings on a 982-acre tract.

Still, when she got the note Lanmon sent to all Early American Culture grads about his retirement plans, she says it never crossed her mind to apply. "I read it and I pictured in my mind the person I thought would be picked to replace him," she says.

Then, she says, a friend called and told her she'd be perfect for the position. Then, a recruiter called.

Four years later, Bowman's 7-year-old daughter, Haley Neuhoff, is the unofficial test marketer for all things childlike at Winterthur. Bowman, her husband, Dr. Cortland Neuhoff, and their daughter live in a Federal-style brick home on Winterthur's grounds. She advises the president on the preservation of the White House. When she visits abroad, newspapers hail her with headlines like this one: "Top U.S. Official on Stately Home Tour."

Twenty-three years after she completed UD's master's program, Bowman is not just director of a museum featuring 175 period rooms and 22,000 square feet of galleries. She is keeper of 85,000 art objects in a natural environment subject to creek flooding, historic buildings leaking and trees falling. She is responsible for more than 100 historic structures. She oversees two graduate education programs with 50 students, runs a gift shop and national mail-order business and supervises a restaurant, a licensed products division and a conservation and research lab.

To boost Winterthur's name recognition outside the Mid-Atlantic region, Bowman is sending exhibits to other museums in the U.S. and abroad. Last year's Winterthur exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington drew a blockbuster crowd of 450,000. One Kentucky family who saw the exhibit changed its vacation plans and drove straight to Delaware to see the rest of the collection.

Bowman also is bringing traveling exhibitions to Winterthur so there's always a new reason to visit.

When she rounds the 11 miles of interior roads on the Winterthur property, Bowman says she is constantly surprised by the beautiful vistas­ducks on a pond, leaping deer, sudden fall colors or snow blanketing a meadow. She realized some of the best vistas are hidden from public view, so her to-do list includes opening walking trails, making use of historic barns and maybe staging more outdoor concerts.

"We're now moving toward really opening up the whole property," Bowman says. "Our challenge as we have redefined ourselves as a great country estate is to decide what are we going to do with the treasures­the train station, our barns, our gardens."

With fundraising up 13 percent over the sagging total last year and corporate donations beginning to spring back, Bowman says she thinks reaching out to meet the needs of families is key to success at a museum whose endowment covers 60 percent of its $22.8 million annual budget.

She says family events widen Winterthur's ticket-buying base and create a new donor base.

When she took over, she says, the average Winterthur patron was a 55-year-old, college-educated female with a family income between $60,000 and $100,000. She says she doesn't have any survey figures, but says she's willing to bet that average age is much lower now.

Sitting in her corner office furnished with Winterthur-licensed reproductions and 18th-Century antiques left over from the public galleries, Bowman says her job has been made easier because, whenever she didn't know something in the last four years, she had either a staff member or a board member who ably filled her in. The average Winterthur employee has been on the job 12 years.

She gave the example of employees who, unbeknownst to her, worked until 3 a.m. the night before Hurricane Isabel unloading two truckloads of art on loan from San Francisco so it would be safe inside the museum. She says employees slept over to watch for downed trees, roof leaks and rising water.

"I often think I'm the luckiest museum director in America," she says, "because I have a truly superlative staff and a board who loves the institution and gives mightily to it, and, when we need them to lead us, they're right there."