Diane (Wilson) Flynn
Honor Code SignatorySigned 27 Nov 2014 | 3,428 contributions | 107 thank-yous | 945 connections
Diane Irene Flynn was born in the 1930s in Syracuse, New York to Syracuse natives Marguerite Leona Hanifan and Horace Harvie "Red" Wilson.
Her father, a member of the Boy Scouts since he was 14, decided to enter Scouting as a professional. The family moved to Willimantic in Connecticut about 3 years later where her brother Donald was born.
When Diane was 4 years old, her family moved to the West Coast to Los Angeles, California and then to San Francisco where she began the 1st grade when she was still only age 4.
Frequent moves took the Wilsons to the California cities of Oakland, Visalia, Carpinteria and Santa Barbara. Diane attended Santa Barbara Catholic High School and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she majored in zoölogy and one class short of a minor in German.
To help pay for her college expenses she took a job as a soda jerk at Moe Leiter's Rexall Drug Store. Next door was Jimmy Maddalon and Bob Cormier's Shell gas station where a young man named John Flynn, also a student at UCSB, worked. They began dating when Diane was almost 18 and married at the historic Old Mission Santa Barbara when she was 20 and in her junior year.
Diane and John graduated in January,1959, about 3 days before their first child was born. Diane had completed 120 semester units after only 3-1/2 years in seven semesters. John returned to school to complete the classes he needed in order to earn a general secondary teaching credential.
The couple moved with their first two children from Santa Barbara to the unincorporated community of El Rio because teachers were paid more in Ventura County. They purchased a modest home in the City of Oxnard a year later, 3 weeks before their 3rd child was born.
Ten years after her college graduation, Diane, by now the mother of 5 children, returned to work at the two-year-old Moorpark College as a half-time laboratory technician in physics and geology.
In 1972, her husband left teaching to become an elected member of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, representing the cities of Oxnard and Port Hueneme and unincorporated beach communities.
Diane began an 18-month master's program in environmental studies at a satellite school (California State University, Dominguez Hills), with classes held in the city of Ventura in 1976. That same year, John was defeated and left the Board of Supervisors.
Diane had delivered her 6th child in January of that year and also began to work half time at the fledgling Oxnard College while still working half-time at Moorpark, commuting between the two colleges on her own time. Eventually she moved to Oxnard College full-time and became responsible for lab preparation for all the sciences: Anatomy and Physiology, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Geology, Horticulture, Microbiology, Oceanography, Physical Geography, Physical Science and Physics.
In the early 90s she had a two-year hiatus as a research scientist at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory where she worked on a team that studied environmental problems on Guam and at Quantico, Virginia.
She retired from Oxnard College in 1993 at age 55 because the workload had become too much for one person. She was replaced by two and eventually three people.
A serial hobbyist, Diane became an avid genealogist in 1994 when four grandchildren were born. Her son had asked about his family's ethnic background and she realized she really did not even know the names of some of her great-grandparents.
Another pastime that Diane has been able to pursue during the past 12 years is philanthropy. Her investments had amounted to unimaginable returns, far more than she needed to be comfortable. Her contributions to charity have nearly reached one million dollars since 2012.
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Diane is 25 degrees from Herbert Adair, 24 degrees from Richard Adams, 21 degrees from Mel Blanc, 26 degrees from Dick Bruna, 23 degrees from Bunny DeBarge, 31 degrees from Peter Dinklage, 20 degrees from Sam Edwards, 21 degrees from Ginnifer Goodwin, 24 degrees from Marty Krofft, 15 degrees from Junius Matthews, 15 degrees from Rachel Mellon and 21 degrees from Harold Warstler on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.
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