Lynne Foringer

Lynne Ellen Foringer was born in Santa Monica, California on April 2, 1956 to Burton Vincent Foringer and Marianna Rucker Foringer. Lynne died at her Los Angeles home suddenly on December 1, 2025. She was 69.

While Lynne spent the first few years of her life in Culver City, California, her father’s work as an Electronics Engineer with Gilfillan Company took the family to Dallas, Texas, near to Marianna’s hometown of Fort Worth, and then Belmont, California for a time before they permanently settled in Los Angeles, buying a home there in 1962. Lynne attended Delevan Drive Elementary School, just down the street from home, followed by Eagle Rock High School, graduating with honors in June 1973. With a state scholarship in hand Lynne began math and science studies at the University of Redland’s experimental Johnston College that fall.

After leaving Redlands, Lynne started working as a reconciler at Security Pacific National Bank’s Glendale Data Processing Center in August 1977. She moved from reconciling to computer operations in 1979, working with the bank’s IBM mainframe systems and printers until 1983. After this, she worked for five years at Dick and June Pettit’s Wilshire Center Print Shop in Downtown LA, becoming skilled at mass document scanning, print and binding operations. While working at the print shop she began studies at DeVry Institute of Technology in Electronics, earning her degree in 1989. Braced by her studies, she joined Xerox Corporation in 1988 as a service technician, working on business equipment in Downtown LA. However, due to illness her time at Xerox was brief. This led to her returning to computer operations in 1989 at Glendale Federal Bank’s Burbank Data Center, where she worked as a tape librarian. Following the merger of Glendale Federal and CalFed in 1998, the Burbank facility closed. Lynne moved on to Farmers Insurance at their mid-Wilshire headquarters, operating printers there for the next decade.

Following her decades in computers, Lynne decided to retrain into something closer to her own interest, her love of books. She entered the Library Technology program at Pasadena City College, and completed her degree right at the height of the recession. This limited opportunities to occasional contract work cataloging private libraries. Despite this, the skills she learned at PCC she often used later, especially her favorite, book repair. Falling back on civic mindedness, instilled in her by her mother who was a poll worker and inspector at local precincts for many years, Lynne became an inspector herself, working on several elections. In 2010 she worked for the US Census and was supervisor over a team of enumerators. Her interest in elections later led her to apply to be a member of the 2020 California Citizens Redistricting Commission, where she made it into the second round of applicants.

Following in the footsteps of her father, whose baritone singing voice won him much praise in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, and later professionally while touring as a member of the American Male Chorus, a group comprised of WWII veterans, singing was a constant in Lynne’s life. While attending the University of Redlands she performed with the University Choir in its beloved Feast of Lights program. In later years she performed with the Pasadena Chorale, Burbank Chorale, Towne Singers (her last group) and in a special event, a benefit concert for North Korean refugees at Walt Disney Concert Hall on July 27, 2017 with the Pacific American Master Chorale, performing songs in Korean followed by Mozart’s Requiem. After the moving performance, Lynne’s mom shared her experiences of Korea with the organizers, as she had been stationed by the Red Cross at Pusan during the Korean War.

Lynne loved to travel, and especially trip planning, making each one an adventure. For example, in 1995 when her friend Kim needed help driving across the country from Mississippi to Northern California over a three day weekend, Lynne made a detailed plan of execution with many stops along the way. After meeting up in New Orleans, they headed west to San Antonio, stopping to visit the Alamo, then lunch at the River Walk. Moving on to El Paso, the stop at Fort Bliss included a visit to the wonderful US Army Air Defense Artillery Museum. From there it was on to Tucson with visits to the Pima Air and Space Museum and Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum with its amazing hummingbird aviary. After that, a flying stop in Mesa with Kim’s parents, and then over the border to California, up US 395 on the eastern side of the Sierras, stopping to visit Fossil Falls, then on to Reno and over the Sierras to Beale Air Force Base where Kim would be stationed. All perfectly plotted and timed to make maximum use of time available, and the trip memorable.

The year prior, Lynne visited Kim in Europe and saw WWII historical and national historical sites in France, Normandy landing beaches and cemetery, the Bayeux tapestry and Mont-Saint-Michel among them, on a week long USO tour. While she didn’t get to visit Chateauroux, France, where her mother was stationed with the Red Cross when she met her future husband in 1954, Lynne did get to visit Heidelberg and Kirchheim unter Teck, locations Marianna was stationed with the Red Cross during the Berlin Airlift. In Kirchheim, Lynne got to see in person the half timbered buildings around the town square that Marianna, an artist, had memorialized in water color paintings that hung on the wall back home. While in southern Bavaria, staying at the historic Chiemsee Autobahn Rasthaus, Lynne and Kim visited Salzburg, Austria, the Hallstatt Salt Mine, and the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) but not the Berghof, which Lynne’s mother visited before its obliteration with the help of willing GIs in the aftermath of WWII. Before her death, Lynne and Kim were considering taking a trip to Japan to visit the locations their fathers were stationed, Burton as a civilian contractor working on ground-controlled approach radar systems at Tackikawa, Japan, and Arthur (Kim’s dad) at Yokota Air Base and then MacArthur’s Tokyo Headquarters where he served as one of four US Air Force combat artists during the Korean War. Interestingly, both men, despite having fought in the South Pacific against the Japanese Empire during WWII, Burton on the destroyer Noa, (DD-343), and Arthur in the 4th Marine Division, came to appreciate and embrace Japanese culture after having lived there for a time.

In addition to a love of travel and exploration, Lynne had a deep love of nature, of its plants and animals, of the forces that shape the climate and make the weather, of the forces that shape the earth, the power of water, the worlds beyond the Earth that blink at us in the night sky. All of the natural world was in her ken. Inspired by the family pets, her brother’s dog Shari and her cat Smokey, she wanted to become a veterinarian, however her high school counselor directed her away from that because it was a “male occupation.” Despite this, through education and reading, and having seven cats of her own over her lifetime, along with caring for three of Kim’s cats, she deepened her knowledge of cats and their behavior, becoming a trusted resource for advice on their care. Other expressions of her love for the natural world included becoming a Weather Spotter for the National Weather Service, getting certification in native plant gardening, growing miniature roses, participating in a lapidary society, and serving as a docent at Malibu Creek State Park for several years.

Well versed in the homemaking arts of cooking and sewing, Lynne was also very adept at crafts like crochet, leatherworking, origami, stained glass, beading, custom cake decorating, calligraphy, among others. Her crafts skills also served her in other areas like assembling or repairing electronic devices, carpentry, assembling complex kits, and of course operating all the machines she worked with over the years in computer operations, at the print shop and with Xerox.

Lynne engaged herself in many personal projects, but sadly, only a few were completed. For the Towne Singers she wrote an introductory guide for new choristers. She wrote a guide and history of the TV M*A*S*H site at Malibu Creek State Park to hand out to visitors. She assisted Kim’s father in documenting his WWII experience in the battle of Iwo Jima. Sadly, there were several other projects that did not get done. Before her mother died in 2018, Lynne was working with her on her autobiography, trying to put into writing all the interesting adventures Marianna had growing up in Texas in the 20s and 30s, and from her multiple tours of duty with the Red Cross. Lynne was also working on writing a detailed history of the Noa, the destroyer her father served on during WWII. And something of a passion project, she was preparing a companion dictionary to use when reading the novels of Charles Dickens, that provided definition of the archaic language found in his works. Lynne had a complete set of his books, reread them often, and was going through them again at the time of her death.

Unfortunately for Lynne, being so gifted and having so many interests, might have kept her from finding her true calling. Or maybe having been dissuaded from becoming a veterinarian sent her down the wrong path. There is no way to know. However, despite the disappointments that she had in her life, it never kept her from always being kind to others, thoughtful and fair minded, caring and empathetic, and retaining a good sense of humor.

Lynne is survived by her brother Vincent and his wife Katherine, her nephew Aaron, nieces Kathryn and Rebecca, and several grand-nieces and nephews. She is deeply missed.

If you wish to memorialize Lynne’s life, consider donating to one of these organizations (clickable links below):

School of Veterinary Medicine DVM Scholarship Fund

California Veterinary Emergency Team (CVET)

spcaLA

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The Nature Conservancy

Or other animal welfare or nature group of your choice.