BY GINNY PRIVITAR
Lynn Mandon is yet another of West Milford’s extraordinary volunteers.
Mandon was a teacher for 35 years at Wayne High School where she taught U.S. history and world history. For the last 10 of those years, she taught those subjects to ESL (English as a Second Language) students before they transitioned to full English-speaking classes.
Mandon is bi-lingual. Her parents moved to Puerto Rico when she was three, when her father, a retired military man, accepted a position at the University of Puerto Rico’s Agriculture Department.
Living in Puerto Rico, Mandon said, “Broadened my horizons as to food, different cultures and acceptance of people’s differences.” She thinks that perspective is probably one of the things that led to school administration asking her to teach ESL.
As a child in Puerto Rico, she learned Spanish first and attended a Spanish-speaking school until fifth grade and then attended the English-speaking school on the U.S. military base. Mandon said all her friends were bi-lingual. She left Puerto Rico at age 19 to attend Fairleigh Dickenson College at the original campus in Rutherford. While there, she met her husband, Larry, a musician who plays guitar and mandolin with the Growing Old Disgracefully Band, known for their Bluegrass music. The Mandons have one son, Lee, 31.
Mandon spent the next decades teaching in Wayne.
“I had a great time and enjoyed what I was doing,” she said, “but I wanted to do other things and decided when I retired (that) now I had the time to volunteer. She is active in the Lions Club and is at the end of her two-year term as president.
“One of the biggest accomplishments of the Lions that I’m most proud of is the health fair that we started,” Mandon said.
The past one earlier this month was the fourth health and wellness fair in the township. She credits fellow Lion Chuck Enering as her right-hand man who does all of the publicity and legwork.
“We have two goals (for the health fair): to bring together all the health professionals in the township and highlight the nurses division of the health department,” she said.
The health fair has been a success; this year more than 200 people attended and attendance increases each year. "We’re getting emails from other professionals asking how they can be part of the health fair,” she noted.
An important service the Lions Club does for the township is the annual amblyopia screening of children in the elementary grades, not just in West Milford, but also in Jefferson, Kinnelon and in Butler. Amblyopia is a sight disorder, also known as lazy eye, which can decrease vision in the eye affected.
“What a great thing to be part of an organization like that,” Mandon said.
As part of her commitment to public service, she is also very concerned about the environment. Mandon says she now knows more about lake preservation than she ever expected. She is the secretary of the West Milford Lakes Committee, an advisory coalition of 10 lake communities in West Milford. The committee meets monthly and serves as a liaison, bringing issues relevant to the lake communities to the council and serving as a source of public education. They have had presentations on weed and algae control, invasive plants and alternative septic systems. The committee will be offering a presentation on recycling on July 18.
Mandon is also the head of the environmental commission at Highcrest Lake, which monitors the well-being of the lake, taking temperature and oxygen readings to make sure it remains healthy.
Still giving of herself as a teacher, Mandon also volunteers as a docent at the historic Hermitage property in Ho-Ho-Kus, which was visited by the likes of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
“Retirement gives me time to do things that I’d never had the chance to do,” she said.
Although Mandon said her friends would laugh to see her in an “In the kitchen” article since she doesn’t cook, Mandon was happy to share a recipe for gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.