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: The Gallery, 1974: A Photographic Directory of the Grossmont College Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont Junior College District, 1974. p63.
Source: Legend Yearbook, Class of 1964. El Cajon, CA:, El Cajon Valley High. p24. Used with permission, courtesy of El Cajon Valley High School.
Source: The Gallery: A 25th Anniversary Photographic Directory of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community Faculty, Administration, and Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, 1987. p66. [Published after Lynch's 1983 retirement.]
Source: Lynch, Jack. A Dream Of Condors. El Cajon: Rattlesnake Mountain Press, 1992. Back cover. Image used in accordance with fair use doctrine for educational and non-commercial archival research, as set forth in 17 U.S.C. § 107, the fair use section of the Copyright Act of 1976.
John "Jack" Edward Lynch’s career as an English professor began in 1942 as Yeoman Jack Lynch, 2nd Class, of the U.S. Coast Guard. Living at first in Los Angeles but working in the San Francisco Bay area, Lynch eventually moved to San Francisco to marry and to continue carrying out his Coast Guard duties performing repairs on naval ships. In 1948, Jack’s aspirations began turning toward the academic, and the Lynches relocated to San Diego County, where Jack, using the advantages afforded him by the GI Bill, earned his Bachelor’s Degree in English from San Diego State College in 1950.
Between 1950 and 1956, the Lynches lived in Escondido, California, where Jack worked as a high school English teacher. He relocated to San Diego east county for a junior high school position as a teacher and librarian, but, before the decade had ended, he transferred to El Cajon Valley High School, where, popular and loved by his students, he remained on staff for five years before Grossmont Junior College brought him onto the staff of its nascent and growing English Department.
During the first three years of his tenure track at Grossmont, Jack Lynch also took graduate courses at San Diego State College, and, in 1967, having focused his thesis research on American Realist author William Dean Howells, he officially earned his Master’s Degree in English and qualified himself for tenure at Grossmont College.
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As at El Cajon Valley High School, at Grossmont College Lynch was well liked by his students and highly praised as an exceptionally effective teacher of college composition who inspired his students to read literature. He, himself, was a devoted reader of literature and poetry, especially keen on author Ernest Hemingway, for which Lynch took a sabbatical to live in Paris for a semester in order to study Hemingway and follow the many places he frequented. Additionally, Lynch was an avid writer, poet, naturist, and hiker/backpacker. After his retirement in 1983, Jack worked during summers for the Park Service, as a Kings Canyon National Park ranger. He was also at this time writing poems prolifically, some of which were published in the El Cajon Daily Californian. In 1992, a local El Cajon publisher, Rattlesnake Mountain Press (in which Lynch, himself, is likely to have played an editorial role), compiled his poems into his first and only published collection, A Dream of Condors. His poems covered a range of topics, many of them nature-related (such as his favorite hiking spots in the San Diego area) and others that were highly personal and confessional, including his memories of teaching, his life in retirement, and his experiences as a World War II veteran. Much of his work was written in praise of nature, environment, and the urban development encroaching upon San Diego County’s unspoiled natural areas, including Rattlesnake Mountain, from which the book’s press was eponymously named.
By this same time, however, Jack had already been suffering for many years from a mysterious respiratory condition, later recognized as mesothelioma, a rare kind of cancer associated with asbestos. Jack’s condition was tracked to his time in the U.S. Coast Guard working aboard the U.S.S. Sterope, a damaged oiler whose repairs included the use of Asbestolith, a light-weight, resilient, skid-proof, and fireproof coating approved by the U.S. Navy for use on the decks of ships. In 1988, the Veterans Administration began acknowledging asbestos-related illnesses as a legitimate disability, and mesothelioma victims (or their surviving families) who, like Jack Lynch, could trace the disease back to military service on ships coated with Asbetolith, began receiving compensation.
Sadly, Jack Lynch succumbed to mesothelioma in October of 1998. Author and friend, Tim Palmer beautifully memorialized Jack Lynch in his 2002 travel journal, Pacific High: Adventures In the Coast Ranges from Baja to Alaska (Island Press, 2002), and, in two 1998 issues of the GCCCD Grapevine, editor Tom Scanlan eulogized Jack Lynch and reviewed his entire collection of poems, even reprinting several of them to give readers an opportunity to discover Jack E. Lynch through the "inquisitive and gentle soul” in his writing.
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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