October 12, 2015

Lynn Teitelbaum

Lynn Teitelbaum was born into a New York family whose American roots ran unusually deep, with even her great-grandparents born in the United States. Her father's family had come from Germany after the Civil War and carried a strong sense of German Jewish identity, something her mother reminded her of often. Her father worked as national sales manager for Skinner and Sons, known for silks and satins, while her mother, once a bookkeeper, worked for South African relatives in import and export. Lynn described her mother as a fun-loving Auntie Mame figure and her father as more Germanic and erratic; her parents divorced when she was about seventeen. She adored her maternal grandparents, who had come from Russia and met in New York.

As a girl, Lynn attended an experimental city school and later navigated several New York high schools, at one point transferring herself between schools without telling her parents. She was a serious student, worked on the school newspaper and magazine, and was a devoted football fan, known as the girlfriend of a leading quarterback. She loved Gilbert and Sullivan and practiced piano daily. Her happiest memories were of summer camp, where she gained sisters in her bunk, learned to swim, play tennis, and do archery, and first truly experienced Jewish religious life through Friday night and Saturday services. She went on to Hunter College as a speech major.

Lynn met her future husband Terry as a neighborhood boy she once dismissed as a hippie, only to fall for him after breaking an earlier engagement. They married in 1951, celebrating nearly sixty-five years together by the time of her interview. The couple began in a one-room apartment while both attended college, later moving to the San Fernando Valley in California for a business opportunity with her brother, and eventually to Dallas for another business venture. In Dallas she taught, worked, and volunteered widely, serving with a neighborhood youth movement and on the book committee at the J. She and Terry raised three children and had five grandchildren, and she urged the next generation to save their money.

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