Sarah Lynch on Her Family and Career

2020 Jane Fonda with Sarah Lynch          DC Climate  Change Protest

Editor’s Note: For some time, I had been looking forward to checking in with my cousin, Sarah Lynch. I wanted the opportunity to catch up with her because I was curious about how her parents, Frank Lynch and Susan Alling Lynch had met, and what life was like growing up in Park Forest with her siblings, Laura, David, Dan, and Austin Lynch. Park Forest was a postwar, built from scratch, planned suburb just south of Chicago. I also wanted to learn more about Park Forest because I had seen its French counterpart in the Parisian planned Parisian suburb of  Villepreux. Villepreux had been developed by another member of my extended family, Jacques Riboud, the husband of my mother’s sister Nancy Gwinn Riboud.

Park Forest had been made famous early on in William H. Whyte’s 1956 book The Organization Man. When I read the book in one of my sociology courses in college in the early 1960s, it critically described the inhabitants of this planned from scratch suburban suburb as being filled with “organization men.”

1977 Bill Bowe and Sarah Lynch        Roberta Lynch Terpstra’s         Wedding

Whyte described these family heads as men of modest aspirations who were looking for a good job with adequate pay, a pension, and a new house amidst others looking for the same things. He tone seemed to catalog these folks as some sort of a new species of dullards to examine.

Sarah Lynch 2003

2003 Sarah Lynch with family  at 2608 Lake View Avenue in Chicago

As I grew up and came to know Sarah’s parents, Frank and Susan Alling Lynch, this portrait was only accurate in describing them as belonging to  an age that had grown up knowing the privations of the Depression and the hazards of World War II.  Little wonder those benefiting from a higher education thanks to the GI Bill of Rights, like Frank Lynch, were looking for a more peaceful and better future for themselves and their children. Though I remember visiting Park Forest only once for a raucous Lynch family party, there certainly was nothing staid or ordinary about these cousins of mine.  Indeed, they were all exceptionally full of life.

Years after I first met Sarah at that 1950s large family gathering in Park Forest, while playing tennis with her father Frank in Lincoln Park early one morning before work, I discovered that Sarah had just recently been in Nairobi, Kenya at the same time I had been. In later years, I followed with interest the occasional news of Sarah’s higher education progress at Kalamazoo College, Michigan State University, where she got her Masters Degree, and Cornell, where she got her PhD. in agricultural economics and met her later husband, Kris Wernstedt.

In January 2025, Sarah kindly agreed to talk with me so I could get a fuller understanding of her family life growing up in Park Forest, her relationships with her siblings and cousins, her unique education, and her career, focused as it was on important agricultural and ecological projects in among other places, Kenya, Cameroon and Tanzania in Africa, and the Everglades in Florida. Our conversation captured her family and trips, her political activism, and her long and distinguished career with the World Wildlife Fund.

The Transcript of the Sarah Lynch Interview is below.

Transcript of Sarah Lynch (SL) Interview

with William J. Bowe (WJB) on January 27, 2025

 

Frank Lynch in WWII, Marriage to Susan Alling, and Move to Park Forest

SL: Well, I guess it all started with my parents Frank and Susan Lynch. From my understanding, and I hope this jives with what you know too, Susan was a roommate of my Aunt Patsy, Patricia Lynch (Heffron), at the University of Wisconsin. Then we moved to Park Forest, Illinois. This would be right as World War II ended, around 1945.

WJB: How did your parents meet?

SL: My mother, Susan Babson Alling Lynch was the roommate of my Aunt Patricia Heffron at the University of Wisconsin. Before my father Frank came back from the war, he gone to the University of Chicago before he got drafted and went on to serve in the Army in The Philippines.

WJB: He didn’t he get to Singapore also?

SL: I never heard a story about Singapore, but that doesn’t mean that he might not have gone there on the way to the Philippines. His wartime military service was mostly in the Philippines in the Army.

WJB: I never knew that. Did you know where he was in the Philippines? Or when exactly that was?

SL: The person who knows this is my brother Dan. It was around 1945, and he was in Mindanao. I think of it as very Vietnam-like, in the sense of much more hamlet to hamlet, hand to hand, jungle kind of warfare.

WJB: Was he in the infantry?

SL: Yes, so he was slogging it out. Correct. And he was wounded several times. He got a Purple Heart for some kind of wound to his shoulder. He had shrapnel in his shoulder for the rest of his life. He had a bullet that grazed his head, and there’s a scar that he had always. And he was in some kind of combat where some of his teeth were lost. And he had malaria. So, it was a rough going.

WJB: Did he ever talk about that with the you children?

SL: Not much. It was not a subject for conversation. I think that there was a lot of PTSD involved, as we now would call it. It was not something that he relished talking about. I think he was very proud of his service. I think he felt that he did what he was supposed to do. But it was not pretty to do. It was pretty tough. And so he came back. And as I understand it, these are his war stories. Whether or not they’re true or not, I can’t vouch for that.

My grandma, Mary Catherine Casey Lynch, and perhaps some set of her parents, maybe my grandpa Patrick Columbus Lynch was there too, I don’t know. But they all drove out to Iowa, perhaps Des Moines, to see Frank in a military hospital upon his return.

Well, it was a very productive five, maybe six years after 1945-46 for my father. When he got back, he went back to school and met Susan. They got married in December 1947. My sister Laura was born a year and a half later in 1949. I was born in 1952. And then we moved to Park Forest, Illinois and he got his law degree. So, a lot happened in that five or six years after the war.

The Frank and Susan Lynch Family Years in Park Forest

WJB: After World War II, was he back at the University of Chicago?

SL: He finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and then got his law degree from Kent School of Law. So, in that four or five or six years after the war, he  got his two degrees, his undergraduate and law degrees, got married, and had two children.

Then they moved to Park Forest, Illinois in the early 1950s. I was born in 1952. I think that before they lived in an apartment in Chicago for a while before the move to Park Forest. Park Forest was a very safety and security conscious development and was an exciting concept of suburban living at the time.

You know Frank more than Susan, of course. Susan came from Ann Arbor, Michigan, so she had a very different life than Frank, who had grown up living in Elmhurst, Illinois. Frank’s growing up was much more ethnically centered. Here’s where the Irish people lived, here’s where the Polish people lived, here’s where the Black people lived.

Park Forest was a brand-new suburb that was built post-World War II to accommodate all the returning GIs. So, it was a happening thing at the time.

WJB: I remember reading about Park Forest in my college studies in the early 1960s. My minor in college was sociology and we read the 1956 book The Organization Man. Maybe you remember that.

SL: Yes, Park Forest was considered just an excitingly novel way to live. The target audience were these returning GIs, who were supported by the GI Bill. They were getting educated, unlike their forebearers, and they had economic opportunities to live in single family homes in some cases. So, it was really an upsurge in the American Dream. It was a real reflection of that American Dream. People were coming and staying.

Park Forest was a totally planned community, but it was very economically diverse. They had rental units, they had smaller homes. It also had lots where people could develop and design their own home. Also, the cookie cutter houses that became such an important part of suburban growth were very much in evidence in Park Forest. It had been designed so the kids could walk to school, so that we could all walk to the library, and the public swimming pools.

WJB: In Park Forest, was that the only house that you lived in?

SL: No, we lived in three houses in Park Forest. It was sort of like the expression of moving on up.  We started out in a small, maybe two-bedroom house on Oakwood Street in Park Forest. I don’t remember that house very well, because we moved from there to the next size up. We lived there for maybe five years. That was on Westgate Street. Then we moved to Warwick.

WJB: That would probably be the only house in Park Forest that I was ever in.

SL: Correct. Yes, that was a party house. Frank and Susan lived there for maybe 15 years. It was beautiful and it had a sunken patio. Do you remember that?

WJB: I just remember the bedrooms on an upper level and the long hallway.

SL: It was a big house, with five bedrooms and four bathrooms. It was a great house for us then. We were five children. Laura was born in 1949. I was born in 1952. David was born in 1955, Dan in 1957, and Austin in 1958. So, bing, bing, bing, bing. We had five kids, three boys and two girls. Most of our collective life was in that Warwick house. It was a pretty ideal place for a family full of kids. You could ride your bike anywhere, because the roads were designed to slow people down. You had a real sense of safety and security.

The Lynch, Heffron and Casey Cousins

WJB: When I was talking with John Lynch, Jr. recently, I was asking him about how the cousins got together, the Heffrons. and the two Lynch families and the Caseys. He said they were all in a great triangle away from each other, but they were always, always socializing.

SL: I think all that generation, Patricia and Walter Heffron and Jack and Roberta Lynch and my parents Frank and Susan, were very committed to family life. As John said, we got together a lot. Somebody was always having a birthday, or it was Christmas, New Year’s or the Fourth of July. All those times were spent at one house or the other. There was a rotation. It was just the way it was. Most of the time, of course, we were the furthest away. We were about 90 minutes travel time from them. That was a really big, hour and a half drive from both Aunt Patsy’s house and Uncle Jack’s house. It was kind of a schlep of a haul to get there. And it was a miracle that given all the alcohol that was being consumed that there was never a car accident. That was a real blessing looking back.

There was always a lot of cousin interaction. We had our peer cousins. Robbie Lynch, Uncle Jack’s daughter, and Ann Heffron, Patsy’s daughter, were all the same age. Similarly, for Steven Heffron and Laura Lynch, on and on. So, there were a lot these cousins overlapping in their years. Also encouraged back then was cross visiting with people coming and staying.

We also had Margaret and Teddy Casey, even though Margaret Casey and Teddy Casey were not our first cousins. They were Frank’s first cousins. But because of their ages, they were like our first cousins. All of them came over to our house. Laura and I often went into Chicago to go see Teddy and Margaret for excitement and total fun. We’d stay in the Lincoln Park apartment of Aunt Martha Gwinn Casey. I have many, many wonderful fond memories of being with Margaret and Teddy and Aunt Martha and Uncle John Casey in their Chicago apartment, eating a leg of lamb.

Frank and Susan Lynch and Democratic Politics in Park Forest, Illinois

WJB: Here’s another thing I wanted to catch up a little bit on. Your mother and father were both very interested in politics. If I remember correctly, your father, was the Rich Township Democratic Committeeman when you were in Park Forest.

SL: Correct. He was spending time on that.

WJB: How did that come about? How were those politics formed?

SL: The middle school influenced my father Frank’s political thinking, I don’t know how exactly. His schooling was all public school, all stable. And he was pretty much a progressive of his day. Park Forest was a place where, a lot of these GIs were pouring back into the economy from all over the United States. I don’t think they were just Chicagoans, but from all sorts of places. It was kind of a dynamic place. For my whole growing up, I remember him being the Democratic Committeeman for Rich Township. He was a Rich Township Democratic Committeeman up until the Vietnam War in 1968. For all the 1950s, when I’m cognizant, he was involved with that.

Later, the Democratic Party was in a transition period away from the old Democratic Party of patronage. We didn’t have any patronage in Rich Township. There was none of that, but we were in Cook County when Mayor Richard J. Daley was the head of the County’s Democratic Party’s organization. Frank did only volunteer work, but Daley was not interested in the outer suburbs. Park Forest was a Republican outer suburb, so we were kind of in that political no man’s land.

But there were a number of Democrats in Rich Township. Frank’s precinct captains were under his purview to organize. Especially in election years, we had a lot of activity with meetings and whatnot. On election night, it was just a wonderful event for us as kids, because the headquarters would be our house. And, and so there was a lot of preparation for election night. Back in the day, you had your committee and your precinct captains from all over the town of Park Forest. They were responsible for calling in the election results. They were unofficial, but good enough to help convey to the higher ups in the Democratic Party exactly what was going on with respect to the votes there.

On election night, Frank would have installed in the house more phone lines so that we had multiple phone lines. On that big wall in the living room that was really big, he would put butcher paper. They would have all the precincts and the names of the candidates. In the rooms, they would set up the telephone. There’d be some set of scribes, and they had the old-fashioned adding machines. At that time, they were probably phoning in all of those results downtown to the big boys with Mayor Daley.

WJB:  I think, the headquarters for the Cook County Democratic party at that time was for many years the Morrison Hotel. After that got torn down, they moved it to the Sherman Hotel, also now torn down.

SL: Yes, that was the big time. Susan was also the backbone of organizing all of these Democratic Party events, and she had always brought in lots of food and drink. As the polls closed, and people had called in their numbers, they all came over to our house. We had big revelry, excitement, and total fun. I do credit my parents for my continuing interest in electoral politics. To this day, I’m very involved in elections and canvassing or being an election judge or something. And I attribute that all to them and to the excitement that I felt about politics. That was a very fun part of our growing up.

Early Education

WJB: Tell me a little bit about your own schooling. Was it all in the Park Forest before you went to college?

SL: That’s another interesting facet about our growing up. We moved to three different schools. I wasn’t in school when we moved to the first house. Then, in our second house, I changed elementary schools. The middle school and the high school were centralized. All of these were public schools, all stable. All of us did the same thing. Laura, Sarah, David, Dan and Austin, we always went through the same process for middle school and high school. It was all really good public school education at the time. Then, I went on not just to college, but to graduate degrees.

WJB: Did you get your graduate degree at Cornell?

SL: Yes, but I did meander a little bit. I graduated from high school in 1970. I was interested in political science and thought that I might pursue that or perhaps a legal degree. That seemed like a good combination in the day. They kind of went together. So, I went to George Washington University here in Washington, DC. And I volunteered at Abner Mikva‘s Congressional office at the time. It was before he became a judge.

WJB: That’s interesting to me because I did volunteer work for Mikva as well. When I was at law school, I did some legal research for one of his campaigns.

SL: I was more of an office gofer than a legal researcher, because I was a freshman in college at the time. But, he was a remarkable man. He was a good and great man to work for as an intern.

WJB: I also caught him. After he retired, and he occasionally worked as an arbitrator. And lo and behold, as Encyclopaedia Britannica’s General Counsel, I had a major patent lawsuit before him. He immediately told the opposing parties that he had a possible conflict of interest. He said to both parties, “You should know before you proceed with the arbitration that my wife years ago worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Do either of you have a problem with that?” I thought if not a good shake, Britannica would at least get a fair shake. Neither side saw any problem. At the very end of Mikva’s life, I would see him turn up occasionally for lunch with some of his dear political friends at The Cliff Dwellers. It was a nice place for him to go and not be bothered by anybody. He could just talk with some of hi