In 1939, Helen Pomerance Johnson was attending a weeklong cooperative leadership camp in Michigan. One of the participants had stayed at youth hostels in Europe, and when those in the camp learned there was a hostel just 7 miles away, they hiked to it.
Johnson, a passionate bicyclist, decided to give “hostelling” a whirl. She took a bicycle trip to the Ozarks, attended a leadership training course at the American Youth Hostels national headquarters in Massachusetts and led a bicycle trip across Canada.
That was the first of 15 trips the former longtime Chicago public schoolteacher led — seven by bicycle, five by Volkswagen Microbus and three by public transportation — over the next 29 years, including visits to post-World War II Europe, Japan and Scandinavia.
“She was truly a remarkable woman and very important to our organization,” said Russ Hedge, CEO of Maryland-based Hostelling International USA, also known as American Youth Hostels Inc., a nonprofit organization that oversees more than 50 hostels across the U.S.
“She was one of just a few women doing what she was doing back then, and at a time when the cycling movement and hostelling was in its infancy.”
Johnson, 96, a longtime board member and past president of the Retired Teachers Association of Chicago, died of complications of heart disease on Aug. 19 at Carlton at the Lake, a North Side senior care facility, relatives said.
A former Hyde Park resident, Johnson also logged more than 3,000 hours over 30 years as a volunteer at the Museum of Science and Industry.
“Helen had a superb ability to organize, and an old-fashioned work ethic,” said her niece Lynne Attaway. “Consequently, she soon became a committee chairperson, and often president, of any organization she was involved with, whether it was related to her occupation, her avocations, or her co-op apartment living.”
For many years, Johnson also belonged to several Chicago-area folk dancing clubs. At one, she met Herman Johnson, a co-founder of the Chicago International Folk Dance community.
The couple were married in 1976 by a judge in Chesterton, Ind., where he had a home that later became their vacation home. For both, it was their first — and only — marriage. He was 70 and she was 57.
“In line dances I’d stand next to him and knew I had a 50 percent chance of being asked for the following partner dance,” Johnson wrote in a short biography of her husband that she posted online shortly after his death in 2004.
Born and raised Helen Pomerance in Chicago, Johnson received a bachelor’s degree from Chicago Teachers College and a master’s degree from Northwestern University. She worked for 35 years as a physical education teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, including Sawyer, Nightingale, Parker and Pasteur schools. She completed two around-the-world trips to study physical education and was part of a hiking group in Nepal when she was 60.
“She was always adventurous, energetic, and generous,” Attaway said. “She had a vision that recreation is participation, not just entertainment.”
Johnson held many leadership positions with American Youth Hostels, including serving as the chairwoman of the Midwest Area Conference from 1949 to 1951 and as a member of the National Board of Directors from 1960 to 1978.
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She was a delegate to conferences in Belgium, Poland, Japan, Finland and Switzerland and served as chairwoman of the 1976 International Youth Hostel Conference hosted by American Youth Hostels at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
In 1995, Johnson was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hostels International-American Youth Hostel Chicago Council.
“She was one of those people who really lived life to the fullest,” Hedge said.
There were no immediate survivors.
Services were private.
Joan Giangrasse Kates is a freelance reporter.