LAURIE JOHNSTON / 1914-2001

Writer chronicled
dramas large and small

The award-winning NYC reporter
spent her final days in Honolulu

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By Pat Gee
pgee@starbulletin.com

"A newspaperwoman" above all else, former New York Times reporter Laurie Johnston died of cancer Friday at her Makiki home. She was 87.

Johnston fell in love with Hawaii when she came in 1943 to cover World War II for Reuters news service, but New York claimed her whole heart, according to her daughter, Elisa W. Johnston of Makiki.

Elisa Johnston had begged her mother to come home after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, "but she wasn't going to leave New York at a down moment. She was in the middle of every story there was. (The attacks) further cemented her to the city. She came (home) at the last possible second, and I'm proud of her."

Elisa Johnston described her mother as "a humanist, a pacifist and an internationalist.

"She was more intellectually alive than any other human being," the daughter said. "She was interested in the world, interested in other people. And she was a fabulous writer."

A columnist, reporter and editor for the New York Times, Johnston was awarded the Meyer Berger Award for distinguished writing by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1980. It cited her "consistently warm and perceptive glimpses of the little and large dramas of New York."

During her last six months in New York, from July, when she was diagnosed with cancer, to Nov. 1, Johnston was very interested in "how the story (of the terrorist attacks) was being covered, how the city was living the story," Elisa Johnston said.

Another daughter, Dana, who lives in New York and Honolulu, "made sure she had a hell of a good time. They tore up the town. Then she came home (to Hawaii) and got seriously ill very quickly," Elisa Johnston said. She had been living with Elisa Johnston for a few months out of the year for the past decade ever since her granddaughter, Katie H.J. Morrison, was born.

Johnston was born in Fort Collins, Colo., in 1914, but grew up in Albany, Ore. She started her journalism career at the age of 14 on the Albany Democrat Herald, hand-setting type, and "was hooked" on becoming a newspaperwoman, her daughter said.

Johnston covered the war in the Pacific from 1943 to 1946 and was one of the few women accredited to report on the Army and the Navy. At the same time, she wrote for the Honolulu Advertiser, her daughter said.

In 1946 she joined News-week's international news department, where she stayed until joining the Times in 1949. She retired in 1984. In 1953 she wrote "Elizabeth Enters: The Story of a Queen," a biography for which her husband served as picture editor. She married war correspondent/Sports Illustrated editor Richard W. Johnston in 1939; he died in 1981. Her second husband, Charles C. Woolley, died in 1986.

She also is survived by a son-in-law, Barry Layne Morrison of Honolulu.

Services are pending and "it'll be a party," Elisa Johnston said.