➤
High Schools ➤
California ➤
East Bakersfield High School ➤
Lynn M. Brown Burnett (formerly Champagne)
| Graduation Year | Class of 1959 |
| Date of Passing | May 16, 2009 |
| About | My sister, Lynn Brown Burnett died in Yuma, Arizona, where she had resided for over 20 years. Though she underwent aggressive treatment, her breast cancer, diagnosed in about 2004, metastasized to lungs, bone, and liver last year. She wasn't one of the "cool, in-crowd" girls at EB, but she loved it there and loved everybody. She idolized certain students; many of you couldn't know it, but she was your biggest fan ("Oh, you should have seen what she wore today; you should have heard the funny thing he said today!"). When she was bullied and scorned by some for her seeming eccentricity, she would talk about it at dinner, perhaps cry a little and then bounce right back the next morning and walk down the block to school for another day of psychosocial adventure. She loved discovering complexities in others and enjoyed nothing more than learning new things about classmates and teachers, oh, yes, and academic subjects too. She might have been among the nerd subculture, but "geeks" didn't have the respect afforded by that term back then. Her dearest friends were Karen Kauk and Ann Charlton, and the names Sami Jenkins, Jean Spencer, and Bruce Detrick (she named her first son after him) come to my mind when I think of people my sister said treated her with special kindness. I shall always wonder what she would have achieved had she gone to high school 40 years later than she did, if she had had the protection of Title IX and the motivation and empowerment of Feminism. Teddy Brown Harrison, '62 |
