Artie Johnson: Matriarch of the Parkrose Business Association

Award named for longtime business association secretary

MID COUNTY MEMO PHOTOS BY TIM CURRAN

Lee Perlman

THE MID-COUNTY MEMO

By consensus, Artie Johnson is the matriarch of the Parkrose Business Association (PBA). That is the role she plays, and that is how all its members, of all ages, think of her.

To begin with, she has the years of service to go with the title. She was a member, and treasurer, of the Parkrose Chamber of Commerce until it was dissolved in 1986 following the annexation of the area to Portland. She was a charter member of the business association, and has served as their secretary since 1990.

“I was drafted by Karl Lind,” she says. “He walked up to my desk at Chet Hill Insurance and said, ‘We want you to be secretary of PBA.’ And you didn’t say no to Karl Lind.”

Although she retired in 1992, “I’ve been involved in everything they’ve done,” she says.

“She’s always worked very hard,” PBA board member and past president Bob Brown says. “She’s very accurate in her notes and with everything, and she’s absolutely selfless in her contributions.”

However, for most members, Johnson’s greatest contribution is not what she does, but being who she is.

“When I first came to the PBA I barely knew anyone,” Wayne Stoll says. “I remember this wonderful lady who was sitting at the front table who welcomed me like a grandmother, with a smiling face and open arms.”

It’s an image that emerges from everyone who knows or has worked with Johnson.

“She’s really the glue that holds us together,” PBA president Nancy Murphy says. “She’s like a mother to us.”

It was as a teenaged daughter that Johnson first came to Portland in 1948. Her father, an employee of a national hotel chain, moved his family here temporarily from Newport, Arkansas to clean a hotel. He later fell ill and had to return to Arkansas, but not before young Artie had met railroad worker Clark Johnson. He followed her back east, married her in March of 1949, and brought her back to Portland to stay the following month. In 1950 they bought a house at 102nd Avenue and Klickitat Street. Artie went to work in the insurance business in 1951, and was hired by Chet Hill in 1958.

“We had two-lane streets in those days, and the freeway ended at Hollywood,” she recalls. “It was easier to drive through Hollywood then.”

Then and now, she says, “I love Parkrose. It’s a city within a city. It’s small enough that you know everybody.”

Especially if, like Johnson, you have been involved with everything. Never having had children, she did not play a regular role in the Parkrose School District (although, she adds, “a bond measure, that’s different.”) She joined the League of Women Voters in 1950, was one of the seven founders of their East Multnomah County chapter, and was its president for two years. (“If it hadn’t been for us, the Home Rule Charter would never have passed,” she says.) She has participated over the years with the Parkrose Neighborhood Association. She has belonged to Parkrose Christian Church since 1977, and there she has served as the first woman chair of the congregation, taught a bible class and sang in the choir.

 For recreation - well, where would you expect a good Christian secretary to go on her free time? To a Winter Hawks hockey game, where she and her sister Julia have been season ticket holders since 1982.

When Wayne Stoll needed to go to Johnson’s house on PBA business he remembers thinking, “Oh, great, I have to go to an older person’s house, probably oppressively hot...I came, and she and her sister were watching a hockey game. They knew the game, too. You can’t stereotype Artie.”

You can recognize her, though. The Memo has done that, naming her Volunteer of the Year in 1986, and senior citizen of the year in 2000.

The National Notary Association (oh, yes, she’s also a notary public) made her one of five of their four million members to be recognized in 1990.The citation mentioned the time she went to a dying person’s home at 10 p.m. to notarize a new will. The award was given, the citation said, “because she lives and works by the principle that honesty is the best policy, and because her humanitarian spirit constantly causes her to reach out and help others.”

In December she became the first recipient of a new PBA award, and has been asked to help write its criteria for future winners. It will be the Artie Johnson Award.

For the past seven years she has lived on Northeast Wygant Street in the Cully neighborhood. Her husband Clark died in 1971 of a brain tumor, and her sister Julia died last year. Her housemates now are two miniature doberman pinchers named for favorite Winter Hawks players.

Johnson has been diagnosed with liver cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy but says she experiences none of the usual side effects. “I’m healthy and I look well,” she says matter of factly. “The fact that I’m told I don’t have long to live is no reason to stop living.”

“She could be having the worst day imaginable, and by talking to her you wouldn’t know it,” Stoll says. “She says she’s feeling great, and it’s not a put-on. She’s our historian and compendium of knowledge, what the soul of PBA is all about.”

“She is truly like an angel,” Murphy says. “She has touched so many lives and inspired so many people. There’s no time when she isn’t there for any of us. It will be so hard when she isn’t. But she will always be with us.”