Ethel “PJ” Johnson was, by her own admission, barely more than an 18-year-old slip of a girl when she first set foot on a college campus.
Growing up in San Antonio, she attended Highlands High School, graduating among a total of 800 seniors. Only 30 or so of her 1965 graduating class, she remembers, were African American.
That lack of representation, she says, did not diminish the plans she had for herself, or the competitive spirit that would remain with her throughout her life. She had no intention of being defined by anyone’s expectations but her own.
Throughout high school, she had run competitive track. And, she says, she did not do it for the medals or the recognition. She did it, she explains, because she was competing with herself.
“I could run the 50-yard dash in 4.3 seconds,” she said with a spark of pride shining through her obsidian eyes. “I was fast. At the most, I weighed maybe 80 lbs. But it was the kind of thing I didn’t do for anyone else. I did it for myself. To prove I could.”
After graduation, Johnson enrolled at San Antonio College.
“I remember the very first time I set foot on that campus,” she said. “And in that moment, I just knew. I told myself that I was going to earn my bachelor’s degree no matter how long it took.”
How long it would take, even she admits, was more of a surprise than an obstacle.
As it so often does, her life would reveal a collage of both expected and unexpected events. And while they may have delayed her goal, she was not a woman who would be denied her dream.
Marriage in 1968 to her high school sweetheart, Claude Johnson, his enlistment into the Army and two eventual tours of duty in Korea, subsequent assignments to Colorado and abroad were like predictably random mile markers along the run of a race that she had learned to anticipate, but to which she would never entirely surrender.
The first time she heard of Central Texas College, for example, she was not a Central Texas resident. She was halfway around the world with her young family on a post in Wiesbaden, Germany.
She had just become a mother for the fourth time, her little ones ranging in age from newborn to thirteen years old.
Anyone giving her advice in that moment might have told her that it was better to wait. They might have discouraged her, assuming that it would somehow be easier to work college into the mix of her already busy life when the little ones were older.
At a time in higher education where women were a minority, and women of color practically non-existent in undergraduate degree programs, hindsight seems to suggest that none of that was an obstacle that she was willing to let stop her.
She enrolled at Central Texas College via one of the distance education locations right there in Germany and began taking classes at night, relentlessly ticking off the required coursework as if she were training for the 50-yard dashes she had mastered in her youth.
“I finally got my associate degree in the mid-1980s,” she said. “But I knew in my heart that as good as it was to reach that milestone, I wasn’t done yet.”
Relocated to Killeen in 1980, Johnson and her family settled into military housing. Eventually, they purchased their home here, raising their four children, Theresa, Nichelle, Tristal, and Jean-Claude.
Her husband, who had remained on active duty, had been sent to Korea twice before his eventual retirement from the JAG Corps. Afterward, he worked for the Texas Legislative Council for 15 years, retiring in earnest in 2007, and eventually keeping himself busy as a crossing guard with KISD.
On her own career track, Ethel had been a civil service employee and information systems (IT) help desk staff with KISD until her own retirement in 2012. She and her husband of more than half a century had raised their children, nurtured them through their own degree attainment, and in that process, temporarily set aside her own degree ambitions.
It would be her husband, in 2013, who would be her inspiration to return to that life goal.
“My husband had a stroke that year,” Johnson said. “It was a very scary time for our whole family. He was in the VA Hospital in Temple, and the staff there took wonderful care of him.”
One day, she remembers, he drew her to his side, and told her that he wanted her to pick up where she had left off. If life were uncertain, he would tell her, it would be uncertain in the best way possible. And he wanted to see her finish that undergraduate degree.
Finishing the last semesters of her degree were a mixture of challenges, triumphs, and persistence: not unsurprisingly, the same characteristics that mark the life of the woman herself.
She has taken one or two classes per semester since her husband’s encouraging words; at first, attending classes on campus. And, in 2020, when COVID upended the best laid plans of so many, Ethel did not give in.
She took her classes, she says, online, taking to the technological format as easily as – well – a runner to a starting pistol.
Even as the oldest student in virtually all of her classes, she has taken it all in stride.
“I loved my time at A&M-Central Texas,” she said, laughing. “Even though I was older than even the oldest faculty member who taught me.”
Often times, she remembers, her classmates would offer to help her, a kindness which she appreciated, but which she often found herself helping them.
And now, having completed her application for graduation as a May 2022 graduate, she is completing a senior capstone course and looking forward to donning the traditional black cap and gown in the company of all of those who have supported her through this journey and all the others that have shaped her.
“The important thing is to not lose sight of your dreams,” she said. “No matter how complicated your life is. No matter how long you have to wait or plan. No matter what obstacles or hesitations you might experience. The most important thing is persistence. Because if you have that one thing, nothing else can hold you back.”