First of all, my apologies for the somewhat clumsily worded title. If you can think of a better one, please feel free to edit. [EDIT: done]

What I am trying to do is use awk inside a bash script and do a rather common task: iterate well structured file lines and split them by a delimiter into an array. Here is a sample from the file:

Joe:Johnson:25
Sue:Miller:27

There are numerous examples how this can be done on a single line in the interactive mode, however, I am doing it in a script in which I would like to use that array manipulated by awk outside the awk subshell in bash itself:

cat ${smryfile} | while read smryline; do

    echo ${smryline}

    #now i want to split the line into array 'linearray' in awk but have it usable when i get back to bash
    echo ${smryline} | awk '{split($0,$linearray,":")}'

    varX=$linearray[2]
    echo $varX
    #do something with $varX

done

I get an error:

awk: syntax error at source line 1
 context is
     >>> {split($0,$linearray <<< ,":")}
awk: illegal statement at source line 1

Is it possible to do what I am trying to do (use arrays that are defined in awk outside of its scope) and how should I do it?