Students honor former OHS teacher

Sitting in Mary Nell Johnson’s classroom, March 30, 1981, it was a normal school day when a voice came on the loudspeaker. There had been an attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life. The president had been shot.
A classroom full of frightened young faces looked up at their teacher. It is a moment Rebekah Kowacich Perry says she will never forget.
“Mrs. Johnson stood up and she was calm and collected, and the calm and peace just washed over the classroom. She told us not to be afraid and to pray for his recovery,” Perry said.
The class calmed down, and the terror passed.
Right now, Mary Nell Johnson is lying in a bed at the Hospice House, a white clapboard two-story structure surrounded by gently whispering trees. After hitting her head in a recent fall, she had a stroke. When the doctors said she would not survive surgery to remove the blood clot, she was moved to hospice care.
Since then she’s had more than 100 visitors since the accident, and in a lucid moment she called her chosen pallbearers, warning them they’d better clean their suits. Every conversation comes around to her sharp way of dressing, and the fact that during her years of teaching her students took more than the ability to type away from her classroom.
From 1945 to 1985, Johnson was at Odessa High School teaching typing and bookkeeping classes to three generations of students. Along the way, students, colleagues and friends agree she also taught them about life.
Her husband, Julius “Jeep” Johnson, became the football coach at Odessa High School in 1941. Mary Johnson worked as a secretary while he served in the Philippines in World War II. After the war, Julius returned to coaching, and she became a business teacher at OHS.
There are a million stories about Mrs. Johnson.
There is the student who claims typing saved his life, her daughter, Karen Johnson, remembers with a smile.
He didn’t want to take the class. He told her he couldn’t type, that his fingers were too big, but she shook her head, brooking no excuses. He was signed up for her class, and he was going to learn what she had to teach, Karen remembered. He was standing on the tarmac, ready to be shipped out to Vietnam, when an officer came out and asked, “Who here knows how to type?” His hand shot into the air and the Vietnam War passed him by while he served behind a desk. Typing.
Then there was the year Skeet Glover hurt his hand in an accident on an oil rig and missed the first couple weeks of school recovering. He was signed up for her class, and she wasn’t going to let him fall behind.
“She was there every afternoon, after school, teaching me what I had missed in class so I wouldn’t fall behind,” Glover said, laughing.
She took no nonsense from her students. One day, she walked in and caught sight of a student sprawled out with his feet lounging across the desk. Johnson walked across the room, knocked his feet to the floor and gripped him firmly by the collar.
“This is my classroom, and in my classroom you will show me respect, and you will learn what I have to teach you. Is that clear?” The student nodded his head quietly. He was a big guy, a tough guy, and a guy even the principal and teachers were afraid of. He caused trouble for other teachers but from that day forward, he was well behaved and attentive in her class. 
Anita Elms took her class in 1950. She said Johnson was special because she never treated the students like children.
“She was a friend really, and I think everyone felt that way about her. She didn’t talk to us like children. It’s really hard to described because there aren’t very many teachers like that,” Elms said.
Perry agrees.
“Mrs. Johnson loved what she did so much and believed in it so much that you wanted to do good for her, you wanted her to be proud of you. She taught us about respect. Respect for ourselves, respect for others … it wasn’t just typing,” Perry said.