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 Wernstedt. I wanted the opportunity to catch up with her because I was curious about how her parents, Frank and Susan Alling Lynch had met 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.

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.”

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

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. 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, her interest in agricultural economics, her family and trips, her political activism, and her long career with the World Wildlife Fund. In January 2025, Sarah kindly agreed to talk with me and 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, Cameroon and Tanzania in Africa, and the Everglades in Florida.