I have just started teaching again after a wonderful relaxing and musical summer. I have had two difficult years and there are many reasons why they were difficult. Some reasons were due to my own inadequacies but some due to circumstances beyond my control. I have been moved back to the English Department after five years away. I am determined to make this a good year. I have come up with a few new strategies and two days in seem to be working fine. If you know anything about teaching, on the first days the students are very well behaved. We shall see. Perhaps I will discuss the situation in a later blog. Suffice it to say that we have a forward thinking, seemingly competent, new, young principal. I am teaching in a department that gives me a lot of help and support. It should be a good year.
My real reason for writing today is that next Sunday there is a memorial service for my much beloved Uncle John and Aunt Phyllis. John died in 2001 but Phyllis died just this past February after suffering serious dementia beginning the day John died. The memorial service is in Phyllis's home town of Burnside, Illinois. Unfortunately the beginning of school prevents me from being there. Terry, Phyllis's nephew and my partner in taking care of the trust for these seven years asked me to write a obituary for John. I thought that I might also post it here, as well as having it read at the ceremony.
John Lynch: July 14, 1914- June 12, 2001
I remember…
John was born in Philadelphia, in 1914 oldest of 4 brothers and one sister. Also in the house lived his generous mother, his scrappy father and his Irish grandmother. John dropped out of school at 15, because of his father’s work disability and delivered packages on his bicycle for Adam’s Express.
In 1937, John and three of his friends, Charley Grodson, Bill Winters, and Jim Kelly, rented a studio in downtown Philadelphia at 1109 Walnut Street. The four attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, 1937 and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1938 and also took classes at the Barnes Foundation.
John was drafted into the Army in October, 1941. He was an artillery site calculator for the 30th Infantry and entered Europe through Normandy in the D-day invasion. He was an avid sketcher of the French and German countryside. He also painted some watercolors of some of his fellow GI’s. He was one of the first American soldiers to see some of the German Concentration Camps.
John went to Bradley College in Peoria after the war to join a friend, and made many more. He took advantage of the situation in the summer of 1946 when he and Phyllis Pope were the only two of a group left on campus during a vacation.
John and Phyllis, as newly weds, went to San Miguel Mexico on the GI Bill, but had to leave when the U.S. government withdrew funds because of a teacher’s strike.
In 1950 John and Phyllis moved to San Francisco briefly, then rented a home on a creek in Larkspur. A year later John bought a small lot on that same creek, designed and built a house with the help of Phyllis and many other friends.
John continued to draw and paint through the 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s while working a “day job” researching land titles for Western Title Company in San Rafael, California. He enjoyed some prominence as a painter in Marin County, as president of the Marin Society of Artists, teacher at the College of Marin and President and Archivist for the Arkites Association. Their little house was for many years the center of the “Boardwalk” celebrations and the place to go for a sympathetic ear, a few jokes, maybe a drink and certainly a good story or two.
Their home was a welcoming refuge for teenagers from the Midwest and East Coast in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Nephew, Ed moved West in the Spring of 1978. Both John and Phyllis were his family, his counselors and the center of every holiday celebration- Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July and a few others. They welcomed, always warmly, first a line of girlfriends, then his wife, Donna, his son Truckee, his daughter Anna and his other son, Joey.
I will remember John’s warm welcome, his brilliance, his stories, his jokes and his kindness.
John Lynch died in his sleep on June 12, 2001- the date of his and Phyllis’s 54th wedding anniversary.
May they both be happily remembered.
