Barbara Ann Johnson, who when young began summering on Jefferys Lane in East Hampton Village with her four siblings and her parents, Thomas A. and June Hess Kelly, and who later made the village her year-round home, died at the age of 87 on April 1 at the Kanas Center for Hospice Care in Quiogue. She had been ill for about a year.
Endowed with a keen mind, a wry wit, a generous spirit, and an all-embracing love of East Hampton, and especially its children, Mrs. Johnson was a popular figure onstage here for years, in plays put on by various production companies, among them the Guild Hall Players, Spindrift, and the Maidstone Regional Theatre Company, always playing to good reviews.
The notices were not so good, however, when her likewise popular Blackberry Nursery School, which she ran out of a large verandaed house on Pudding Hill Lane owned by her mother, was shut down in the early 1970s by the village board, then in the grip of a recurrent attack of officiousness.
Happily, justice was served shortly thereafter, when, in East Hampton Town Justice Court, mother after mother testified that it was not a business Mrs. Johnson was running, that she had never asked them for money, but that it was essentially an act of love.
Later, she oversaw a nursery school at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, and moved with her family to a historic house, the former East Hampton Riding Club, just south of Cross Highway on the way to Skimhampton.
“I’ll always remember Grammy saying, as I left the house on Cross Highway, ‘Mind the tourists!’ and ‘Thank you for being you,’ ” said Tracey Schenck, one of Mrs. Johnson’s grandchildren, who lived with and cared for her at the end of her life. “Grammy always called her grandmother her best friend, and I’m proud to do the same.”
Kelly Kunzeman of Sag Harbor, Mrs. Johnson’s daughter, recalled her mother saying, “The doors are always open and the lights are always on,” and “If the Lord had anything better [than East Hampton], He would have kept it for Himself.”
Besides her nursery schools, at various times Mrs. Johnson was the curator and docent at the village’s Home, Sweet Home Museum, taught Sunday school at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and oversaw the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s summer program.
Given her wide circle of friends, it could be said she was the consummate East Hamptoner. They included East Hampton’s Old Guard, her fellow parishioners at St. Luke’s, summer theater people, Bonackers, her large family, and a number of boarders as grateful for her beneficence as the stray animals she took in.
Born in New York City on Feb. 10, 1933, Mrs. Johnson attended the Foxhollow School for Girls in Lenox, Mass., before graduating from East Hampton High School in 1951. She attended Bennington College in Vermont afterward, then taught for a time at St. Barnabas Elementary School in the Bronx.
“My mom was strong, resilient, and beautiful,” Mrs. Kunzeman said. “She loved her natural surroundings, especially the beach and the ocean. I know her spirit is there.” Another granddaughter, Whitney Schenck, remembered her grandmother’s love of the beach and ocean too.
“God gives us a newly painted canvas every day,” she recalled her saying. She added, in writing, “I hope that I will be able to share with my children and grandchildren the passions she shared with me.”
Edward Galligan, a neighbor and friend, who once drove Mrs. Johnson to a surprise birthday party on North Haven where she was feted by her many friends, recalled the warm glow of fireside light he saw through the Riding Club’s dining room window during one of her yearly birthday parties for fellow Aquarians, to which he, born under a different sign, could not go. She loved light, he said, especially the golden light at the end of a day. With her death, he said, “a great deal of light is gone.”
In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Johnson’s survivors include two sons, Christopher Schenck of Raleigh, N.C., and Eric Johnson of Center Moriches. A brother, Thomas A. Kelly Jr. of Housatonic, Mass., and a sister, Carolyn Kelly of Frankfort, Ky., also survive, as do 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Her eldest son, Charles Schenck, died in 2011. Two sisters, Maureen Congdon and Linda Hodgkin, also died before her.
Mrs. Johnson donated her body to the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. A service is to be held at a future date.
The family has suggested that memorial contributions be directed to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which treats catastrophic children’s diseases at no cost to its patients’ families: 262 Danny Thomas Place, Memphis, Tenn. 38105.
