**Shirley Johnson speaks at a lunch club she organized in 2019. Photo by Lorine Parks**

Just a few weeks ago, lamenting the death of her Downey friend Rosalie Sciortino, Shirley Johnson said to me, “I wonder how fully we can prepare for the death of someone who has been one of the main branches of our family tree.

“Lorine, why is it,” she said, “we learn more about people and friends after they leave us?” Now ironically, we get to learn more about Shirley, who died at the end of November.

Shirley was a 30-year member of the Rotary Club of Downey, one of the first women to be invited to join the club.

“The most important to me are always the children,” she said. “So many go without the basics. I believe all children should be treated with honesty, humor as is appropriate, and respect. I was raised in England in a very strict way with those values. We must all help to keep the world turning and that means helping where and when we can.”

These were the values that made Shirley and Rotary so compatible.

Eccentric, brusk but not rude, and frank to the point of being brutally honest, people loved her for it. Shirley had a big generous heart and boundless optimism under that British reserve.

She was stubborn too. Driving together to a Rotary function, I discovered one night that she did not have a GPS installed.

“I can find my way with my Thomas Brothers maps,” she said. We became slightly lost.

Born in England, Shirley was Hertfordshire to the bone.

“It was very rural,” she said, “no paved sidewalks, sheep and cows grazing and completely surrounded by thick woods, wild blackberries we picked in season and crab apples that we would eat on the way home from school as a snack. Very sour.”

Shirley originally intended to emigrate to New Zealand but she stopped in Los Angeles along the way, and fell in love with our climate. She opened her travel agency, Best Travel, in Downey in 1977, and she occasionally led trips she designed herself.

“We try to stay away from the canned tour,” she told me in a 2019 interview. “We prefer to stay in the out of the way places, small country villages, in the 17th and 18th century Coach Inns, dining in well -known watering holes such as ‘The Pub,’ best food in the world.”

Shirley branched into a personalized airport taxi service that in later years became a much-needed personal van service to take the elderly to their medical appointments. Her clients became her friends and both sides felt like family.

To shake hands with Shirley, as we do in Rotary, was to feel like you were the handle of a suitcase she had picked off the baggage carousel for a client. She had a firm handshake and you knew you would never be lost luggage.

Lately Shirley organized an informal Lunch Club for as many as 30 people who tried out whatever new restaurants Shirley suggested.

“I don’t have any agenda,” said Shirley. “I just invite people to come. Originally I started this for the Women’s Guild of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. But then I invited clients from my travel agency, and they asked friends.”

Shirley was passionate about the Downey Symphony and was a great supporter of Sharon Lavery from day one when Sharon was chosen to be the new Music Director 12 years ago. Shirley never missed a concert if she didn’t have to work, and often brought a friend.

Shirley was proud of being a cancer survivor for over 20 years, and she always advised people to have check-ups. Nevertheless, she had arranged with fellow Rotarian Greg Welch to have him take care of her remains after she passed. Knowing how Greg and Barbara at Risher Mortuary treated the loved one with respect and dignity she felt her very specific wishes would be carried out by them.

Although she was an intensely private person, she had confided to me in a matter of fact way a few weeks ago, “I am having surgery on my neck and back. The back part is to correct something done ages ago that apparently never healed properly. This might be a big operation, and two weeks minimum to recoup. There goes my Thanksgiving business.”

Shirley resisted having her picture taken, but here she is last year, arriving at the Rotary Children’s Christmas luncheon, with her festive party hat and suitcase filled with candies. She always sat at Santa’s right hand and personally gave each child a treat. Note she is using a cane. As she liked to say about herself, “That Shirley, there she goes again!"

Caring for abused animals, like Tippi Hedren’s Shambala Wild Animal Preserve in Acton, mattered to Shirley. Indeed, she identified with them, as she wrote me after one of our club’s virtual meetings, “the best part of the Zoom segment was the very cute animals. Being half Dog myself, I enjoyed looking at them than the other faces gracing my screen.”

“When I leave,” Shirley liked to say, “I shall be cremated, as Muffin was (she's in my China cabinet), and both of us shall cross the ‘pond’ landing back in Hertfordshire in the family plot with my sister and three Daffodil bulbs to show the world each Spring, WE'RE BACK!”

Remembering Shirley Johnson, traveler and civic leader