Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Source: English Department Gallery Photos. Private Photograph and Documents Collection. Copyright Homer B. Lusk. Digitally reprinted with permission, courtesy of Homer Lusk, Grossmont College Professor Emeritus and former English Department Chair.
Source: 1963 Oak Leaves Yearbook. Pasadena, CA: Polytechnic School, 1963. p21. [Cropped] Image used with permission, courtesy of Polytechnic School, Pasadena, CA.
Source: The Gallery, 1970: A Photographic Directory of the Grossmont College Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont Junior College District, 1970. p27. [Cropped ]
Glen Lane (a.k.a. Glenn Allen Lane, II) was accepted to the College of William and Mary in 1951. However, faced with dwindling financial support and anticipating his inevitable conscription into the U.S. Army, Lane withdrew from William and Mary at the end of his first year and instead joined the Army Intelligence Agency. Serving as a cryptanalyst in Salzburg, Austria, Lane met fellow officer Ken Nobilette, who would not only become a future Grossmont colleague, but would also become Glenn’s lifelong and closest friend.
Glenn was not the only family member to be living in Europe during this time. Between fall of 1954 and summer 1955, his sister, Judy (Lane) Casino, and his mother were residing in St. Gallen, Switzerland. In addition to spending Christmas that year with Glenn and Ken Nobilette in Salzburg, Judy Casino recalls another particularly memorable incident from one of their excursions: "When we arrived by ship in Rotterdam, Glenn and Ken met us and drove us through parts of Europe for a week in the Fall of 1954. We were crammed into Glenn's VW Bug, 'Frigga.' The car had a mishap near Mouchard, France, where the fan belt broke at night at a railroad crossing. Glenn and Ken went for help, leaving my mom and me in the car with Ken's bread knife for 'protection.' The guys did manage to get us to a Mouchard hotel for overnight. They had the fan belt replaced in nearby Besancon and drove us safely into Switzerland by the next evening."
After being stationed briefly in Bad Aibling, then honorably discharged in 1955, Lane returned to California and enrolled in Glendale Junior College the next year. Having accumulated sufficient credit at the College of William and Mary to earn an associate’s degree by the end of first year, Lane transferred to the University of California at Riverside in 1957 and by the summer of 1959 earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in English. So began a lifelong relationship with literature, English, writing, and teaching.
Glenn’s senior thesis on the George Bernard Shaw’s plays subsequently led him to a year of study as a Shaw scholar at Dublin’s Trinity College, and by summer of 1961, with the submission of his Master’s in Literature thesis on Shaw, earned his advanced degree and returned to Southern California. For the next five years, Lane taught English at Black-Foxe Military Institution in Hollywood and at Pasadena’s Polytechnic High School. Then, in fall of 1966, he re-entered graduate school at Riverside as a doctoral candidate in Literature.
By this time, close friend Ken Nobilette, with whom Glenn had served in Europe in the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency, had been tenured to the Math Department at Grossmont Junior College (and would eventually step into the position of Dean of Arts and Sciences). Having recently become disenchanted with U.C. Riverside’s doctoral program, Lane ended his doctoral studies after the first year, and Ken Nobilette recommended him for an English position at Grossmont, where he joined the full-time faculty in time to begin teaching in the fall semester of 1967.
Off campus, Lane had a skill and passion for boating, and even lived for a time on a houseboat. In August of 1967, having organized a six-member crew that included his sister and Grossmont colleague Hugh Peterson, Lane sailed the 40-foot Columbia Constellation in record time on a perfect course from Honolulu to San Pedro, California. On campus, owing to his graduate studies in literature, Glenn typically took the helm for literature courses like Introduction to Literature and English Literature, but also taught mainstay college composition classes, for which he had built a fearful reputation as an old-school hard-nosed task master who did not well suffer the unprepared student. Colleague and former Department Chair Homer Lusk recalls Glenn Lane’s ability to send students away from his office either with a renewed purpose, or with tears—sometimes both.
In 1988, after the passing of his father, Lane would start handing off the mantle of his literature courses to other instructors, and by the end of the fall semester in 1990 he quit teaching altogether, officially declaring his retirement from the District at the start of 1991. Several years later, along with his lifelong paramour, Marie, he would relocate to Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Canada. Upon the death of Marie in 2011, the widowed Glenn relocated briefly to South Carolina to be with his stepdaughter. Then, after settling his affairs in Qualicum Beach, he spent his last month with loved ones in San Diego County. Glenn Allen Lane II passed away on January 30, 2013.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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