Marita Johnson honored as ‘super volunteer’

Marita Johnson, a retired seventh-grade biology teacher who has had a second career as a super-volunteer, has been honored by the Springfield Regional Chamber of Commerce as its Citizen of the Year.

http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20120224/NEWS02/702249955

Published February 24, 2012 in the Rutland Herald

Marita Johnson honored as ‘super volunteer’ at Citizen of the Year

By SUSAN SMALLHEER
Staff Writer

SPRINGFIELD – Volunteerism is in Marita Johnson’s genes.

Johnson, a retired seventh-grade biology teacher who has had a second career as a super-volunteer, has been honored by the Springfield Regional Chamber of Commerce as its Citizen of the Year.

“She’s a one-woman whirlwind,” said Sandy MacGillivray, who nominated Johnson for the award.

Johnson said she comes to volunteerism naturally. Her parents, school teachers from the Erie, Pa., area, received their community’s “The Golden Deed Award,” she said.

“I come from a family of teachers,” said Johnson, who said much of her volunteerism stemmed from her work as a teacher for 32 years in Springfield. After she retired from Riverside Middle School in Springfield 11 years ago, Johnson helped found the local public access television station, SAPA-TV, with her husband Bruce, as well as the local chapter of Osher Lifelong Learning.

She’s one of the pillars of the very community-centered Springfield Garden Club, which was honored last year by the chamber as its Citizen of the Year.

Johnson is also well known for her fabulous iris garden, which she opens to the public in late May-early June every year, and serves her guests — often strangers — iced tea and cookies in the garden as well, and then gives away her extra iris rhizomes in the summer.

Additionally, Johnson was very involved in the 250th anniversary celebration of Springfield’s founding, a celebration that spread out for months in 2011. MacGillivray, herself a former teacher at Springfield High School, said she only got to know Johnson after she retired from school.

“Her work on the 250th was like a tornado,” said MacGillivray, who along with Barbara Clancy paid tribute to Johnson during the award banquet held at the Hartness House Inn last week. MacGillivray and Carol Cole, executive director of the chamber, said Johnson designed and produced the historic calendar that marks the town’s 250th birthday.

“She is a doer, not just a talker,” said MacGillivray, who volunteers with Johnson on the garden club.

To two generations of Springfield students, Johnson is “the bog lady,” as she introduced every middle school student to the North Springfield bog, helped get students and parents to build a bog-preserving boardwalk, and generated interest by the local Audubon Society to preserve the bog.

Johnson said she retired in 2001 because she felt teaching to two generations was enough. “I didn’t want to hear from my students that I had taught their grandparents,” she laughed.

Johnson, who grew up in western Pennsylvania, was teaching in Connecticut when she came to Vermont to ski and met her future husband Bruce on the slopes of Okemo Mountain in Ludlow. The couple married, and Johnson moved to Springfield to teach biology.

She started teaching her seventh-graders how to take videos of the different projects they were working on, adding music. Johnson and some of her former students make video programs for SAPA.

Her green thumb led her to help restore the gardens at the Miller Art Center, as well as painted the French door windows at the center. She learned how to paint during her college summers.

She also cleaned and cleared “mounds of brush” at the historic Eureka Schoolhouse and Baltimore Covered Bridge. She also designed and planted perennial gardens at the schoolhouse.

And in addition to that, she is the Springfield Garden Club’s historian and public relations chief.

Johnson said Wednesday she does volunteer a lot, but she loves doing it. She once totalled up her hours at five months worth of a full-time job.

It’s her special video programs on SAPA that has earned her countless fans. Often, she said, she is called to cover events, and editing that into a program is her special interest. She plans on doing about 50 programs a year for SAPA.

She completed four special programs on the 1976 Springfield bicentennial quilt. She said she distilled 100 hours of interviews with the women and men who made the quilt, creating an oral history program.

She also worked tirelessly on her program in 2007 commemorating the 1947 crash of a B-29 plane into Hawk’s Mountain in Weathersfield.

Between all her special town and family projects, Johnson loves to garden at her Randall Hill home.

In her spare time, Johnson likes to crochet and knit.

But her volunteerism has interrupted her concentration. It has taken her nine years to finish one sweater.

Marita Johnson of Springfield was named the 2011 Citizen of the Year recently by the Springfield Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Photo: Susan Smallheer / Staff photo