Alton Lynch was born June 25, 1906, at his family's home on the old Bells highway east of Denison, Texas. He was a 1927 graduate of Denison High School. While still in school he began a ten-year association with Denison's J. C. Penney store, starting as a salesman and advancing to the position of assistant manager.
On June 21, 1934, he married Mary Catherine Smith. They were married for more than 56 years. They have one son.
Around 1937 Alton and Mary moved to Dothan, Alabama, where
he managed the local J. C. Penney store. He enlisted in the Army
in 1943 and was discharged in 1945. In 1947 they returned to Denison, where he managed the dry goods store of J. F. Landers on Main Street for two years. In 1949 he purchased the dry cleaning business of J. R. Turner on Rusk Avenue and renamed it Alton's Cleaners. In 1951 he opened Lynch's Department Store at 211 W. Main Street.
In September 1913, when Alton was seven years old, he and two sisters, along with a cousin and two other children, were picking cotton on his uncle's farm near Bells when a passing man with a camera and notebook stopped to observe. The man was Lewis Wickes Hine, photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. Seven prints of the pictures he took of Alton and the other children are now housed in the Library of Congress.
[Obituary by James K. Sears, who took the children's first names, recorded by Hine, and researched census and other records to find the last names of the three Lynches and Ruby Hugh Lane.]