Marilyn Ann Johnson

Marilyn Ann Johnson (February 6, 1936 - January 19, 2024 Marilyn Ann Johnson passed away on January 19, 2024, in Boulder, Colorado. Born on February 6, 1936, in Garkida, Nigeria, she was the daughter of Brethren missionaries Lloyd Raymond Studebaker and Modena Minnich Studebaker. After attending high school in LaGrange, Indiana, she went on to get her B.S. in Elementary Education from Manchester College and her M.S. in Education from Indiana University. She married Gerald "Jerre" Homer Johnson, her partner for life, in 1958. Several years later, they moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, where they lived for over 50 years. They celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary in 2023, a month before Jerre passed away. Marilyn was a gifted and lifelong teacher of young children. During a career that spanned four decades, she taught pre-school, kindergarten, and second and fifth grade. She remembered with special fondness her years as a teacher and director at the Williamsburg Parent Cooperative Preschool, where the ability to set her own curriculum led to lots of activities, field trips, and children enthusiastic about school and learning. Her family remembers that parents came up to her years afterwards saying what good memories they had of the time their children spent in her classes. Marilyn also taught at Bright Beginnings and Head Start, two programs for at-risk children, and after retirement was one of the creators of the Preschool Literacy Project, which provided books and led story hours for under-privileged children. She worked for several years as a site coordinator for Road Scholar (Elderhostel), leading trips in Williamsburg, Charlottesville, and elsewhere in Virginia. Always of curious mind and interested in the world around her, she traveled extensively with her husband and family. She loved cross-country camping trips with stops to see relatives, friends, and national parks, cruises in Alaska and along the Rhine, and trips to Portugal, Belgium, the U.K. and Australia. Throughout her life, she stayed in touch with students from Hillcrest, the school she attended in Nigeria, and with them attended a number of school reunions in Denmark, India, the U.S., and elsewhere. She was active in the Williamsburg United Methodist Church, where she played for years in the bell choir. Music was always an important part of her life, whether playing her accordion or gathering family around the piano to sing as she played. Marilyn will be remembered for sharing snakeskins and stories from Nigeria with her students, for her patience when mastodon bones from her husband's archeological dig took up residence in her living room, for the pleasure she took walking down Duke of Gloucester Street, for her appreciation of all things chocolate, and above all for her loving kindness and gentleness. Survivors include her sons Mark Johnson and David Johnson, her daughter Jeannine Johnson Maia, her sister Shirley Oltman, her grandchildren Daniel, Tyler, Ethan and Allie, and the many people she touched as a teacher and mentor. Both Marilyn and Jerre will be honored in a Celebration of Life service at the Williamsburg United Methodist Church on Sunday, February 18, 2024, at 3 pm. Donations in her name would be much appreciated and may be made to the Williamsburg Parent Cooperative Preschool at https://williamsburgcoop.com/giving/ or Child Development Resources https://www.cdr.org/make-a-gift/