Teddy Joseph Jensen

Teddy Joseph Jensen, 79 of Columbia died after a brief illness on Saturday, June 22, 2019 at Boone Hospital Center. Mr. Jensen was born July 25, 1939 in Columbus, GA, to Russell Vivian Jensen and Lula Eloise Harris Jensen.

Mr. Jensen earned a B.S. degree in education from Auburn University in 1963 and an M.A. degree in romance languages front the University of Alabama. He taught high school in Sparta, GA, in 1963-1964. He taught at Wake Forrest University in Winston-Salem, NC, in the late 1960s and taught at the University of Alabama and the University of Missouri in the early 1970s.

He discovered a desire to help others that led him into the field of nursing, working briefly at the Selma Medical Center Hospital in Selma, AL, and then for 27 years as a nurses’ aide at the VA Hospital in Columbia, retiring in 2008. He moved to Bogota, Colombia, were he free-lanced part-time as a teacher of English as a foreign language until poor health forced him back to Columbia in 2015.

Pole vaulting was his sports passion as a youth. He was proud of a second-place finish in a Georgia state high school track meet in 1956. In his later years his avocation became writing screen plays.

Mr. Jensen is survived by two younger brothers: Ronald Vivian Jensen of Columbia; Imri Augustine Jensen and wife Wanda of Leesburg, FL; a niece: Sarah Elizabeth Jensen-Weaver, M.D., and husband Alex of Jacksonville, FL.

He will be laid to rest in the family plot in Selma, Alabama at a later date.