KATIE BUTLER JOHNSON: STILL WRITING, STILL CURIOUS!

by Shanon Weaver

When Katie Butler Johnson started writing for Celebration Magazine, she was already a veteran of the page. From community columns to newspaper essays to volunteer interviews, she’s spent most of her life finding—and telling—great stories.

“I’ve written in every single issue except the one on medicine,” she says.

Now 85, she’s been with Celebration for over twelve years and is still going strong.

Her relationship with writing goes back to her teens. She was born in New York City, raised on Long Island, and commuted into Manhattan every day for school. She attended an elite Sacred Heart school on a scholarship—one her mother had also earned.

“The nuns were cloistered—they didn’t go out,” she says. “But the education was phenomenal. They taught us how to write. There were writing competitions across all the Sacred Heart schools around the world.”

Her first column was for a tiny neighborhood paper.

“It was a very small paper called Between Ourselves, and I wrote the ‘Cool Cats Corner.’ I was maybe 15 or 16.”

She also sent letters to world leaders and movie stars, just to see who might write back.

“I used to write letters to the King of England, to movie stars—just to get letters back. That was a thrill for a child.”

Katie studied European and Russian history in college. But a visit to her brother at Notre Dame changed everything.

“That’s where I met my husband. It was an instant connection.”

He was heading to UC Berkeley to pursue a PhD in nuclear physics. They married young, and she moved west with him—finishing her degree as a new wife and soon-to-be mother.

They arrived in Berkeley in the early 1960s, right as the free speech movement took hold. Her husband joined a cohort of physicists that included Nobel Prize winners. Katie, meanwhile, found herself immersed in a world of science she couldn’t quite translate.

“He said, ‘You need to know a little about what I do,’ so he sent me to Physics 101. It was all during the student uprisings, and I was learning about atoms in a giant auditorium.”

She even helped type his dissertation.

“I didn’t know what I was typing. There’s such a thing as a scientific typewriter—with all the squiggles and wiggles. I just did the rough draft and someone else typed it up properly.”

Eventually, the family settled in Dallas, and Katie raised their four children. But she never stopped writing.

“I did a lot of writing for nonprofits—advertising-type stuff. Not for profit, because nonprofits usually can’t afford to pay much, and I was in a position where that was okay.”

After her husband passed in 2003, she went to the local volunteer center and asked where she could help.

“They said, ‘You’ve done a lot of writing, we’ll put you in that area.’ So I started writing the spotlight column for the McKinney Courier-Gazette, interviewing people in volunteer positions.”

That led to a regular column as a “Voice of the Community” for the Dallas Morning News.

“They wanted columns people could really connect to—gut-wrenching, not fluff. I wrote about my sister’s suicide. I wrote about how I handled traveling while my husband was dying. Both of those brought in a lot of responses.”

She’s written everything from science reflections to travelogues for Celebration. One highlight: her piece on nuclear fusion.

“About a year ago in Berkeley, they managed to duplicate the energy of the sun for a few seconds. That could mean fusion energy—solving our electricity problem without fission. My husband was working toward that, but he never lived to see it.”

Another favorite was her story about circling the globe with National Geographic in our last issue.

“I’d written about bits and pieces before—Easter Island, Machu Picchu—but I finally told the whole story.”

Katie still writes the way she lives—curious, thoughtful, unhurried.

“I start something and let it marinate. I never know how it’s going to end. I don’t write it all at once. Then someone says, ‘I loved your column,’ and I feel okay.”

Asked what advice she has for other seniors, she doesn’t hesitate.

“Follow your bliss,” she says. “Why wouldn’t you?”