Miss Edith Johnson
Pioneer Newspaper Woman
By Naomi Taylor Casey*
It was before the birth of women's "lib" and its ambiguous title "Ms.,"
so they called her Miss Edith when she began as a wide-eyed woman
reporter in 1908. Miss Edith she remained through fifty years of
molding the minds, manners, and morals of her innumerable readers.
When Miss Edith Johnson, columnist for The Daily Oklahoman,
spoke at Classen High School in Oklahoma City, the students were
inspired by the surprisingly gentle strength of her message. Here was
a woman, even in her fifties, who understood-a woman who held
forth hope. Through the years many of those students remained her
fans.
"I simply could not start my day right without first reading and
soaking up your sage advice about life's problems," wrote Mrs. Robert
Sprague of Lawton, Oklahoma, in a letter to Miss Edith in 1959.
"Reading your article was as necessary as coffee for breakfast."
She was the first born (November 11, 1879) of five daughters of
Smith L. and Mary Caroline Hatcher Johnson, in Lexington, Ohio.
When only eleven years old she wrote and distributed copies of The
Young Ladies' Journal. At the budding age of fourteen it was her
yearning ambition to marry and have at least six children. She was
horrified when a dear cousin, a contemporary of her mother's, said to
her, "Edith, I have just had a vision of your future. You will never
marry. Your life will be cast along entirely different lines."
Those lines began to take shape when she attended Miss Phelp's
English and Classical School for Young Ladies in Columbus, Ohio,
where she edited the school paper, The Blue Stocking. While a stu-
dent at Ohio State University she planned to study to be a writer.
However, at the end of her freshman year she left school due to the
death of her mother, and she returned home to care for her younger
sisters.
Later in life Edith described the "birth of triplet sisters as an
almost cataclysmic event in my life." Edith had been at the bedside
when one of the triplets died of peritonitis at the age of nine months.
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