Life must have seemed very sweet and very full to Jane Linsky as she began her day on June 26, 1959.
She and her husband, Penn State professor Chester Linsky, were wrapping up a year of living in the magical city of Paris where “Chet” was based as a consultant to European manufacturers. Jane loved the City of Lights, and she could actually see the Eiffel Tower from their apartment. She was blessed with a wonderful au pair to help manage her three children—Jan, 8; Deane, 7 and Glenn, 4—and a fourth baby was on the way.
Best of all, Chet would arrive home shortly from a business trip to Italy, just in time to help her celebrate her 33rd birthday. And then, just a few days later, the family would head back to their home in lovely State College.
But Jane’s special day ended in devastation. Chet never made it home. Just a few minutes after takeoff from Milan-Malpensa Airport, his flight, Trans World Airlines 891, ended in an explosion when lightning struck the aircraft. All 59 passengers and nine crew members were killed in the deadliest air tragedy of 1959.
What follows is the story of how a dedicated Happy Valley mom overcame that disaster to raise four children who all graduated from Penn State and did graduate studies. Although she passed away last May 29 at the age of 97, Jane’s maternal heroism demands that she be honored as this column’s “Mother of the Year”—the first posthumous selection. Fortunately, Deane (“Richard Deane Linsky”), my best friend since high school, has filled in the gaps in my knowledge of his mom, a woman whose example should be inspiring to all single moms.
“SURVIVAL MODE”
Deane remembers little from that 1959 day when his daddy passed away. He does recall that Jan and Glenn were sitting with him on their apartment balcony, and all three kept looking down at the parking lot where their father, a professor of industrial engineering, would be arriving. “We had been sitting there a couple hours,” he said, “when our mother came and told us he wasn’t going to be coming.”
And that’s all the memory that Deane still possesses from this tragic event. “That was basically what I was told—that Daddy was not going to be coming home.”
Most of the family’s belongings had already been packed for the return to State College. Now, with her husband gone and her due date approaching, Jane needed to hustle the family back home and make arrangements for her childbirth.
As for Jane’s mental state, she had no time for self-pity and very little time for healthy grieving over the loss of her husband. “I think my mother went into immediate survival mode,” says Deane. “She had that fortitude, iron in her spine, that I think she inherited from her parents and their struggles during the Depression.”
JOYFUL BIRTH
Due to deliver her fourth baby in late July, Jane went into labor two weeks early—perhaps due to the stresses upon her mind and body. But even though Gary arrived just 15 days after Chet’s death, the surviving Linskys were ready to rejoice in his birth.
“The one thing I remember,” says Deane, “was all of us agreed that God had sent Gary to fill the gap in our family. I remember that being a solace for all of us, how happy we were to have Gary. He wasn’t going to replace Dad, but he was going to fill in the gap.”
Jane still needed to complete her grieving process, of course, but according to Deane she did that privately. “I can think of times I would hear her weeping in the bedroom, but not in front of us.”
Meanwhile, the new widow/new mom made sure she often reminded the children of their father’s love. “She was vociferous in praise of our father,” notes Deane. “She talked about how he loved us kids. He was a family man, and he couldn’t wait to get back from his trips to see us.”
“DEEPLY IN LOVE”
Married slightly less than 10 years, Chet and Jane enjoyed an outstanding relationship of mutual respect and warmth. Some may have said it was a “marriage made in heaven,” but if so, they would be referring to an interfaith paradise. That’s because Jane Moon Linsky was reared in a southern Protestant home, her father having taught music at Asbury College (Wilmore, Kentucky) and Louisburg College (Louisburg, North Carolina), both then Methodist schools. Chet, meanwhile, was Jewish, a brilliant and well-mannered native of Boston.
“Jane’s decision as a southern Christian woman to marry a Jewish man from the north was very independent and unusual at that time,” says Stephen Smith, Jan’s husband. “They were deeply in love. Chet was the man she wanted to be with, and she was determined to go in her own direction.”
The two met at Oklahoma State University in 1947. Chet was working on his master’s degree in engineering. Jane had earned her bachelor’s degree in dietetics at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now UNC Greensboro) and was doing a one-year internship in Stillwater.
Chet was clearly smitten by this eye-popping southern girl, a fact best illustrated through a story told by Glenn. It seems that a former boyfriend had driven all the way from North Carolina to Oklahoma in order to visit Jane, and Chet was distressed by the potential competition.
“My father was so upset and distracted,” says Glenn, now an insurance agent in Plano, Texas, “that he got the only ‘C’ he’d ever gotten in his life. The course was thermodynamics. Years later when he was teaching his first class at Penn State, it was thermodynamics and Mom said he stayed just two weeks ahead of the class.”
RELIGIOUS BARRIERS
The couple’s marriage ceremony took place on Sept. 2, 1949 in Louisburg—after some religious barriers were navigated.
“The wedding was outside on my lawn,” Jane once explained, “because Chet was Jewish and we couldn’t have it in a church. It had to be after sundown so as not to violate the Sabbath.” Sadly, only Chet’s brother, Leonard, made himself available to represent the Linskys at this marriage of a Jew and a Gentile. (After Chet’s death, Jane reached out to the family and arranged several pleasant visits to Boston with the kids.)
Of course, other religious concerns would later need to be addressed, like the spiritual education of the children. According to Deane, his dad would drop off Jane and the kids each Sunday at State College Presbyterian Church and go on to his office to work. Says Deane, “He figured that if the kids thought he was working, there wouldn’t be a sense of confusion about why dad wasn’t going to church, too.
“The agreement between them was that until Jan was 9 and I was 8, we would go with Mom to church. Then when we reached the age for Hebrew school at the synagogue, we would attend those classes until we had our bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. After that, each child could decide what religion to follow.”
It was a fair plan, but it went by the wayside after Chet’s untimely death. Jane was simply too busy in caring for her brood to expose them to another religion that she didn’t fully understand.
STOUT-HEARTED, SINGLE-MINDED
No one—not even Jane—would have expected it to be easy to raise four kids without a helpmate. But anyone who thought the assignment was beyond Jane’s reach did not know her very well.
“There wasn’t anything Jane Linsky couldn’t do,” says Deane. “She could sew. She could cook. She was economically astute. She had resources from our father’s insurance, and she knew how to make those resources go a long way. And after Gary was ready for high school, she did a bang-up job as an administrator on campus for the architectural engineering department and for the Applied Research Laboratory.”
Indeed, Jane Linsky was a fearless female before Gloria Steinem’s “Ms. Magazine” which was founded in 1971 said that was OK. And she proved her mettle most convincingly on the streets of Paris. So what if she couldn’t drive a standard transmission car when she and Chet arrived there? Why not learn to use a stick shift while driving the circle around the Arc de Triomphe, even though locals considered that loop to be a “traffic circus”? Sure enough, Jane did make peace with a standard transmission while driving around the Arc, but the older kids never forgot Chet howling, “Clutch it, Jane. Clutch it!”
Of course, Mrs. Linsky’s self-confidence and determination could be intimidating to men who might have wanted to pursue a relationship with this widow. Is that why she never remarried?
“I suppose,” says Deane, “that despite Mom being a really gorgeous woman into her 60s, it was difficult for a man to get close to her. Mom was not the dating type of widow. She was immersed in the success of her four children. Besides, she and Dad had been so in love that it would probably have been impossible for anyone to replace him.”
FRUGAL & FUN
Despite being blessed by her husband’s life insurance—which she used to purchase a home on the corner of East McCormick Avenue and South Pugh Street—Jane needed to watch her pennies. She did so partly by assigning household chores to the children and also directing them to jobs that suited their ages. At one time or another, Jan did babysitting; Deane and Glen mowed lawns and shoveled snow; Gary arose early each day to deliver the Centre Daily Times.
Food was never wasted in the Linsky household, even when an experimental recipe didn’t work out for Jane, a topflight cook who was renowned for her pecan pie. As for clothing, Jane had acquired expert sewing skills from her mother, a home economics teacher and expert seamstress. No wonder, then, that she sewed almost all of Jan’s and her own clothes. And, according to Glenn, she even repaired used baseballs by re-stitching their worn covers.
For the boys’ clothing, Deane remembers taking annual “back to school” trips to Unkel Joe’s Woodshed in Clinton County, where name brand items were sold cheap because of minor flaws. Jane would mend the flaws and then fix the severed branding tags (the merchants’ sign of the original blemish). Voilà…and State College’s rich kids would wonder where the Linsky boys got their stylish shirts and pants.
But even as Jane employed her frugality to make ends meet, she also utilized her adventurous spirit to make life fun. She took the family on trips to her parents’ home in North Carolina and to a cottage at Maryland’s Deep Creek Lake which belonged to Tom and Diane Jones, dear friends and neighbors from the early years in State College.
Most notable, however, was the family’s great road trip of 1966. Jane did all the driving since Jan was not quite 16, and the family covered some 5,000 miles from State College to Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and back home. Said one hotel clerk along the route, “One woman traveling alone with four children? That’s crazy!”
FAITH COMMITMENTS
Although she was a confident driver—automatic or stick shift—Jane always made sure to commit a family trip to God before leaving home. “Whenever we would go out on a trip,” recalls Deane, “she would always start us off with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm.”
In Jane’s philosophy of parenting, religious exposure and moral training were both crucial. As for the religious component, the children found themselves participating in church activities at least three times per week: choir rehearsal, Sunday school and the Sunday worship service. The boys also frequented State College Presbyterian Church one more time each week for Boy Scout meetings (Deane, Glenn and Gary all became Eagle Scouts).
Such a commitment bore abundant fruit in the kids’ adult lives. Jan professed a strong faith in Christ and worked alongside her husband as a lay volunteer at Redeemer Presbyterian, a famous Manhattan congregation. (Jan passed away in 2018 after battling cancer for a year.) Deane served as a pastor for 32 years before his 2020 retirement, including 28 years at CrossWay Church, an Evangelical Free congregation near Reading. Glenn has served as an elder at Providence Church of Texas, located in the suburbs of Dallas. Gary became active in Catholic worship during his Air Force career, eventually becoming a chaplain. Today, he is the senior priest at the Basilica of St. Peter in Columbia, South Carolina.
DISCIPLINE DYNAMICS
Jane Linsky aspired to excellence—in her own life and in the lives of her kids. “She was a towering moral example for us kids,” says Deane. “I may not have always enjoyed her expectations for me, but as I look back now, I’m so thankful for her example and for believing in me, my brothers and my sister.”
“She had a wooden paddle,” notes Deane, “and she had no hesitation in using it.” But he also says his mom rarely needed to dispense physical discipline. One reason was that she could clearly communicate her displeasure with just a raised eyebrow, especially when she was singing in the church choir and one or more kids began to act up in a nearby pew. But even more importantly, the Linsky children saw Jane as a paragon of virtue who walked the walk as much as she talked the talk.
No wonder they say that the feeling of disappointing her was worse than any sting imparted by a paddle. “I knew how much my mother had done for us,” says Deane, “so I had a raging guilt if I ever did anything that would hurt her.”
“She taught us to be honest,” Glenn adds. “She said we absolutely had to always tell the truth and that carried over to when we went to friends’ houses for dinner. She said that if a friend’s mom asked how we liked the meal, we were not to lie if we didn’t like it. We were told to say, “It was interesting.”
ANY SHORTFALLS?
By now, dear reader, you’re wondering if this mother of four, grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of 22 was the first perfect matriarch to ever grace the earth. Well, she was not. Yes, she was a paragon of virtue, a woman who donated 40 gallons of her own blood to help others. But she also was a person who sometimes offered unsolicited advice or unwanted criticism to other adults. Fortunately, as one close relative noted, “Age mellowed her. As she got older, she got sweeter. Her friends at Foxdale Village (where she spent her last 17 years) adored her.”
Asked to summarize his amazing mom, my buddy Deane wisely quoted from the Bible’s Book of Proverbs, chapter 31, verses 27 to 29: “She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’ Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”
PREVIOUS “MOTHER OF THE YEAR” HONOREES
Sue Paterno (2019). Not only did the wife of Coach Joe Paterno raise five children and send them all to Penn State, but she gave motherly support and one-to-one tutoring to at least 60 of her husband’s football players.
Kim Sublett (2020) is the mother of three biological children, six adopted children and one grandchild. Her mothering skills also show up big-time in the life of Calvary Church Penns Valley where her husband, Stacy Sublett, is the pastor.
Lydia Abdullah (2021) is the mother of two and grandmother of three. She is legendary for the motherly hugs she has dispensed in her family, in her church (Unity Church of Jesus Christ) and within various Penn State departments where she served as a staff member for 42 years.
Joyce Porter (2022) has raised 14 children—nine biological and five adopted—including two sets of twins and one child with special needs. She also has 15 grandchildren; her love for kids is boundless.
Susan Strauss (2023). A single woman and Penn State faculty member, Susan adopted six young Ethiopian children in less than two years and none of them spoke English. Today, all have completed high school, three have graduated from Penn State and one will be a PSU junior next fall.
Karen Foard (2024) raised four of her own children and is now eager to meet her 12th grandchild. She has assisted more than 5,000 new mothers by providing expert counsel on breastfeeding.
