April 29, 2015

Lynn Heffler

Lynn was born in Abilene, Texas, in 1942, where her father had taken a job in the jewelry business after the war. The family briefly lived in Oklahoma City before returning to Dallas, where both of her parents were from. Her father grew up in the jewelry trade, following his grandfather, who had been among the first hires at a prominent jewelry company and worked there for over 50 years. Her mother was born in Fort Worth and raised in Dallas, where her own mother ran a store on Second Avenue and her brothers owned a chain of stores around the city. Lynn recalled that her father was the largest baby born at Parkland Hospital for many years.

Lynn grew up in Dallas with a younger brother, Richard, with whom she always got along well. As a child she attended a grammar school on Forest Avenue, then Longfellow after the family moved to the Lover's Lane area when she was around eight or nine. For fun she went to the movies and spent summers with an aunt and uncle in Athens. She graduated from Hillcrest High School, where she enjoyed football games and the activities shared by the young people from Temple, then attended North Texas for a short time before deciding the working world suited her better.

After high school Lynn worked at a downtown mortgage company and married Jerry in 1961. Jerry started in the plumbing supply business his father had owned, worked as a representative for a California company, and then spent over 40 years in the insurance business. Lynn worked for the first several years, sometimes traveling with Jerry around Texas and Oklahoma, before staying home to raise their three children, two sons and a daughter. They were members of Temple, and later in life Lynn began volunteering with the Dallas Jewish Historical Society, drawn by her lifelong roots as a Texan and Dallasite. She vividly remembered the day President Kennedy was shot, when her son was only three weeks old, and the events of September 11th.

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