Jean Lyttle, a retired kindergarten teacher at West Marin School who lived in Inverness and Inverness Park for over 50 years, passed away on March 7, at 87 years old.
Jean was a Bay Area native who loved the outdoors, taking her kids to the beach during summers and backpacking with her husband around the state once her children were grown up. She had a wry sense of humor and was utterly unpretentious; she preferred to cut her own hair, her daughter remembered.
“She was very modest, and whenever I praised something, she’d always protest. That was just her nature,” said her husband, Rick.
Jean was born in Minnesota but grew up in San Francisco. She was the oldest of three girls, and the trio liked to play in a local fountain in the city. Her daughter, Jenny Snodgrass, said Jean was the “leader of the pack” and stubborn, according to stories her mother told her. One time, after new neighbors moved in, Jean’s mother told her to play with the little girl next door. She didn’t want to, so she convinced her little sister to throw mud on the neighbor’s sheets hanging outside to dry.
Jean graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. It was there she met Rick, also a student, on a blind date at a costume party. She was allegedly dressed as a trout, though all she had to show for it was a bluish-green blouse. (“She had to announce that she was a trout, but it wasn’t too convincing,” Rick said.) He was dressed as a pirate, and wore a bandanna; later, when they met up again, he said she was happy to note he wasn’t bald.
They married in 1949 and moved to Oxnard, in Southern California, where Rick worked on his family’s ranch for a few years and then as a journalist for a local paper. During the postwar years, schools were desperate for teachers, and Jean started substitute teaching. She also gave birth to their three children—Matthew, Jenny and Herbert.
In 1962 they moved to Inverness, where her family had kept a summer home. They rented the Gables—now home to the Inverness library— for a few years, starting at $95 a month, from historian Jack Mason. But he kept raising the rent, so they bought a house in Inverness Park in 1969 and lived there until last year.
In Inverness, Jean began working as a substitute teacher, including at a one-room elementary school for ranch children. Eventually she secured a full-time position as the kindergarten teacher at West Marin School.
Rick said she knew how to handle her class. One trick up her sleeve when the students got rowdy was to whisper; the kids, anxious to hear what their teacher was saying, would quiet down. “The kids would be afraid they’d miss something. They’d be rapt. She used this stunt all day,” he said.
The children also provided a regular stream of amusing one-liners that she shared with the family when she came home from work. “One kid asked if there were Humpty Dumpties in the zoo,” Rick recalled with a chuckle.
Her daughter, Jenny, said her mom took her to see the Beatles perform in Golden Gate Park when she was 10. (Jean’s mother sat on the organization’s board.) Jean was not exactly the Beatles’ biggest fan. “She was born in 1927. She was into Frank Sinatra and big band,” Jenny explained, but her mother took her excited daughter to see the famous group anyway.
Herbert, her son, died when he was just 21, in a solo car accident in Point Reyes Station. It was a tragic event, Jenny said: “That was a real big blow for them. But it also made our family closer.”
Jean retired from teaching in the early 1980s. Jenny said she stepped down when she started seeing kids in her class who were the children of former students. Rick added that it was hard for her to leave, and she ended up volunteering for a few years, helping the new teacher.
Jean and Rick adored the outdoors—sailing, kayaking, playing tennis and taking the family on car-camping trips around the West. The couple took up golfing at one point, although Rick lost interest after Jean started beating him on a regular basis. After the kids were grown, they backpacked, too, at Big Sur and Marble Mountain Wilderness, and they also traveled abroad, to Paris and Costa Rica. More recently, the two took up bocce ball.
About eight months ago, they moved out of the longtime Inverness Park home to live with Jenny. “We got the gift of being with her every day, and every night for dinner,” her daughter said.
The week before she died, Jean and Rick took one last trip, to a spa in Calistoga, in Napa. “They spent their last weekend up there. They hadn’t gone out of town for while. It was really sweet,” Jenny said.
Jean Lyttle is pre-deceased by her son, Herbert, and her sisters, Sheila Sheehan and Cynthia Haldeman. She is survived by her husband, Rick; her son and daughter-in-law, Matthew and Shelley; her daughter and son-in-law, Jenny and Frank; four grandchildren, a great-grandchild and many nieces and nephews. For those who would like to offer a donation in her honor, her favorite organizations were the Dance Palace Community Center, Papermill Creek Children’s Corner, and the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History.