Sarah Elizabeth Johnson

Sarah was born on a March morning in 1954, in a small hospital overlooking the Willamette River. Her mother liked to say Sarah arrived early and kept arriving early for everything for the rest of her life — first to class, first to volunteer, first to arrive with a casserole when a neighbor was grieving.

She met David at a college folk-dance night in 1974. He stepped on her foot twice before she agreed to a second dance, and he never let her forget that she said yes anyway. They married two years later in her parents' backyard, under a tent that nearly blew away in a spring storm. Everyone remembers the laughter.

“Teaching isn't about the lesson plan. It's about noticing the child who needs noticing.”

For thirty-one years, Sarah taught fourth grade at Maplewood Elementary. Former students still stopped her at the grocery store — the poet, the nurse, the boy who couldn't read until March of fourth grade and later graduated from law school. She kept every letter they sent her in a shoebox she called her “retirement fund.”