Ocalan celebrates 104th birthday

Mae Ola Johnson celebrated her 104th birthday on Sept. 24, 2024. [Photo by Andy Fillmore]

Mae Ola Johnson summed up her feelings last week about celebrating her 104th birthday on Sept. 24.

“I feel good,” she said.

Johnson reads a newspaper daily and keeps in-depth notes of her activities and interests on a pad she keeps at the ready.

She is a person of deep faith and has been a member of Greater Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church for perhaps 89 years, according to a family member. Her activities there have included teaching Sunday School for juniors, being secretary for the praise band and also for the Pastor’s Aid program.

“My mother used to walk to church with her father-in-law, who was blind,” said her daughter, Sandra Johnson Brown, who lives with her mother in southwest Ocala.

Johnson lived completely independently until around age 100. She discussed her biography recently surrounded by her daughter, family friend and “adopted daughter” Joan Hall and longtime church friends Thomas Harper and his wife Edith.

Johnson was born in Ellaville, Georgia, to parents who operated a farm. She was the 13th child in a family of 17 siblings. She moved to Ocala and met and married Willie James Johnson Sr. around 1942. The couple had six children.

Johnson worked for a time in the post-World War II years as an elevator operator at the Marion Hotel at 108 N. Magnolia Ave. in downtown Ocala. The hotel is currently under renovation with plans by the developer to open a “boutique hotel.”

According to Ocala Main Street, with research references credited to the Historic Ocala Preservation Society, the hotel was built in 1927 and financed by the sale of stock certificates sold by the Community Hotel Corporation. The seven-story, 100-room hotel was built to accommodate Ocala’s growing tourism and business. It remains one of Ocala’s tallest buildings. The building is under renovation with plans by the developer to open a boutique hotel.

Johnson recalled the former Marion County Courthouse being located on the property that now encompasses the downtown square.

Johnson also has served as a domestic worker and provided child daycare for working mothers.

Brown said her mother gave her guidance when she, as a toddler, encountered segregated “white and colored“ water fountains in the downtown square area. She affectionately called her mother a “strict disciplinarian.”

“She didn’t spare the rod,” Brown said.

To which Johnson said with a smile: “Had to.”

Mae Ola Johnson, who celebrated her 104th birthday on Sept. 24, 2024, poses in her southwest Ocala home with her daughter Sandra Johnson Brown. [Photo by Andy Fillmore]