Margie Jean Johnson

Margie Jean Johnson, October 12, 1931 to November 29, 2023 Margie Johnson was born Marjorie Jean Richardson on October 12, 1931 in Roundup, Montana. Margie died on November 29, 2023, at her home on Deep Run Farm in Madison County, Virginia. In between those times and places, she covered a lot of ground and touched a lot of people. When Margie was seven, her mother and father were divorcing. Her father’s parents moved with her to a log cabin 30 miles north of Yellowstone National Park in Emigrant, Montana. The cabin had no running water or electricity, and Margie attended a one-room country school, but she later wrote, “I have only happy memories of that time living with my Grandma and Grandpa Richardson.” When her parents’ divorce was finished, Margie was taken back to Roundup to live with her mother, Grace Richardson. Part of Grace’s pay as the Palace Hotel night clerk was a room for them to live in. World War II was heating up when Margie turned 10, and so they went to Portland, Oregon where her mother worked during the days as a welder at the Swan Island Shipyard and at nights as a waitress. Margie and five other girls whose mothers worked at the Shipyard were boarded at a “good stable home in the country.” Grace Richardson’s dream was to be a professional singer, and when she had saved enough from her two jobs, Grace and Margie moved to Chicago to study with Eugene Feuchtinger, the founder of The Perfect Voice Institute. His family had two spare rooms (and wanted a live-in babysitter), so Margie and Grace boarded with them. In the summer of 1945, after they both had two years of voice training, Grace and Margie made the big move to California. Margie recalled being there on V-J Day, September 2nd, 1945, when the downtown L.A. streets where they lived “were crowded with celebrating Americans, mostly service men hugging and kissing every girl they saw.” They moved again when Grace got a job in Hollywood and Margie enrolled at Hollywood High. A friend invited her to the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and then to a youth retreat at Forest Home in the San Bernadino Mountains. To get money to pay for Margie to go, Grace cashed in a war bond. Margie said “That was the best investment she ever made on my behalf! For at the first evening meeting, I received Christ as my personal Savior and my life was changed forever.” In high school and in college at UCLA, Margie was part of the church’s “deputation team” that shared the gospel in jails, honor farms, homeless shelters, and at youth retreats. Margie often gave the message at UCLA’s sororities. The deputation team was led by Bill Bright, who founded Campus Crusade. Also during Margie’s time at Hollywood Presbyterian, she had the chance to meet some of its celebrity-members such as Jane Russell, Debbie Reynolds, Colleen Townsend, Roy Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Dennis Morgan, and the war hero, Louie Zamperini. After Wednesday night prayer meetings, Margie and many of her friends from Hollywood Presbyterian would often go to Du-par’s Restaurant for 25¢ pie and 10¢ hot chocolate. On one of those nights, Margie squeezed into a booth between one of her girlfriends and a guy she hadn’t met before, Jay Johnson. They got to talking and she invited him to an Inter-Varsity retreat up in the mountains that weekend. Two weeks later, Jay asked her, “You wouldn’t consider marrying me, would you?” and Margie answered, “I’d consider it.” They announced their engagement during Margie’s 21st birthday party at the Hollywood Cocoanut Grove. Their pastor, Rev. Dick Halverson, a future chaplain of the U.S. Senate, performed Margie and Jay’s wedding. (Actually, they had already secretly eloped and gotten married one month earlier at the Hitching Post, Las Vegas’ first wedding chapel.) Jay was working in the Supersonic Wind Tunnel at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Margie took a break from college to do office work there to help her mother pay for her bridal gown and large church wedding. That college break lasted 23 years. In the late 1950s, Jay invented a new fiberglass process and started his company, Glas-Craft. Much of Disneyland was built with his invention and process. His process also revolutionized the boat building industry and entirely changed the manner, cost, and time in which boats could be built. Jay built a 50’ catamaran, the Glass Slipper, with his process. Jay and their son, Scott, sailed it in the Trans-Pac yacht race from San Pedro, California to Honolulu and won three times. Jay sold Glas-Craft and bought an 800-acre island in Fiji. While Jay was in Fiji building the Kaimbu Resort, Margie went back to college and flight school. She finished her bachelors at UCLA, got her pilot’s license, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Fuller Theological Seminary. She did her dissertation on the comparison of “self-concept” between people in the industrial culture of the U.S. and those in the tribal culture of Fiji. For six years, Margie operated her own counseling center near their home in La Canada, California before selling it and moving to Fiji full-time to help Jay open the resort. From the beginning to the end of Kaimbu Resort, Ba and Filiti Vulakoro from the neighboring Yacata island worked with Jay and Margie each step of the way, and when Scott and his wife, Sally, moved to Kaimbu, Margie felt she could breathe a little easier. But eventually, after what Margie described as “eight rigorous and exhausting years” they transferred Kaimbu to the Fuller Foundation. (Kaimbu is currently owned by Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley, Inc., and Red Digital Cinema Camera Company.) While Jay and Margie were deciding where in the world they would move next, they remembered that one of their Kaimbu guests had told them about the beauties of Virginia. When they walked through the front door of the main house at Deep Run Farm they said in unison, “This is it!” Margie and Jay moved there in 1995. Margie was preceded in death by her husband of sixty years, Jay Johnson, her father, Earl E. Richardson, her mother, Grace Emma (Lind) Richardson, and her two sons, Kenneth Rand Johnson and Jay Scott Johnson. Margie is survived by her two grandsons: Michael Jay Johnson, of Palmdale, California, and Charles Rand Scott Johnson, of Auckland, New Zealand; and her half-brother Larry Richardson, of Billings, Montana. The family and friends viewing time will be at Clore-English Funeral Home on December 18, 2023 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00, with the funeral service to follow, also at Clore-English. A private graveside service will be at the family cemetery on Deep Run Farm.