E.B. (Edward Barnes) “Ted” Leisenring Jr. (1926-2011) was the CEO of a fourth-generation family coal-mining business. He was president of Westmoreland Coal from 1961 to 1988, and remained as chairman of the board until 1992.

Edward Barnes Leisenring was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on January 26, 1926, the son of Edward Barnes Leisenring, Sr. (1895-1952) and Margaret Pierce Leisenring (1897-1970). He received the equivalent of an elementary and middle school education at nearby Episcopal Academy. He attended the Hotchkiss School from 1940 to 1943, at which point his studies were interrupted by non-combatant military training and service. He graduated with a bachelors in English from his father's alma mater, Yale University, in 1949.

As heir to the family coal-mining business founded by his great-grandfather over a century earlier, he was sent to the mines of the Stonega Coke and Coal Company in southwestern Virginia to learn the business from the ground up, including a term loading coal underground as a member of the United Mine Workers. In 1951, he married Julia du Pont Bissell (1930-).

His father dying young as the result of Parkinson's disease, Leisenring was recalled to the Philadelphia office as vice president of the several family companies in 1952. He was either president or chairman and CEO from 1959/1961 to 1988, and held the emeritus position of chairman until his final retirement in January 1992. He was chair of the National Coal Association in 1970-1971 and of the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, the industry bargaining agency, in 1976-1978. In the first capacity, he led the first visit to the Soviet Union by an industry delegation, and in the second, he represented the operators at the time of the record 110-day strike of 1977-1978, by which the miners ended wildcat strikes in return for a thirty-seven percent increase and lifetime medical care. His last years at the helm were complicated by a collapse in oil prices after 1984 and the resulting shrinking and increasingly volatile international coal market. His retirement brought an end to direct family management, and the companies were drastically restructured during the 1990s.

After formal retirement in 1992, Leisenring maintained a small private office, first at West Conshohocken and then at Paoli, from which to manage his other business affairs. He was the senior director and later chair of the venerable Philadelphia Contributionship, the insurance company founded by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), and a director of the Southern Railway Company, playing a role in its successful merger into Norfolk Southern Corporation, forming one of the two surviving big eastern railroad systems.

From 1968 to 2009, Leisenring was also a director of Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships, Inc., initially an organization of eastern Republican business leaders designed to serve as a living memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower's (1890-1969) international outlook (and Cold War objectives) by bringing members of the emerging technocratic elites from around the world to the U.S. for advanced training. In this capacity, Leisenring was brought into close contact with the traditional Republican leadership and traveled to many countries making business and social contacts.

As a former English major, at various times he attempted to develop some of his experiences, both on the Main Line and at the mines, in the form of drafts for short stories. In retirement, he engaged Philadelphia journalist Dan Rottenberg to write his family's story as In the Kingdom of Coal. Leisenring generally withdrew from public affairs after 2009 and died at Aiken, South Carolina, on March 2, 2011.