Lynne was my only first cousin. My mother had no siblings and my dad had only one, my Uncle Leo. Leo married Suzanne Dickens from Texarkana after meeting her when they were both students at Hendrix College. Lynne was their first child. Three others were born, but they either died very soon after birth or were stillborn. Now comes a further sadness due to a death in the family, as of about 7:30 this morning. Lynne was fighting metastatic breast cancer (it began as inflammatory breast cancer) for going on four years.
My mother took this picture in 1990. She was having some event at our house honoring Lynne. After the picture was framed (see info below), it sat in the area behind Lynne's left shoulder in the photo. The book on the marble coffee table is a local book of oral histories compiled by Pat Rhine Brown about her father, T. E. Rhine, M. D., a country doctor in the area around Rison and Kingsland (Cleveland county, just southwest of Pine Bluff) during the early part of the 20th century.