Frances Marie Johnson – who died Saturday, just days before her 76th birthday – became King Soopers’ first female manager, a position she accepted with some trepidation in May 1976.
Petite, sporting a bouffant so buoyant it seemed nearly airborne and wearing the large, round glasses that Dustin Hoffman used to great effect in the movie “Tootsie,” Johnson said she never considered herself “a women’s libber.”
When her supervisors asked her to consider the job, Johnson hesitated.
“She had to think really hard about it,” said her daughter Cathy Wolfgang, also a King Soopers store manager. “She told me, ‘I’m not sure that I would want to work for a woman.’ But the thing that turned her around was that she looked at all the male managers, and she knew she could do the job as well, or better than they did.
“She was always up for a challenge.”
She got it. On her first day, Johnson’s supervisor told her that he liked his coffee “hot, black and on my desk at 7 a.m. every morning.” (She complied.)
The daughter of a railroad worker and homemaker who lived in Denver ever since her parents relocated here from Pratt, Kan., Johnson worked at several grocery stores before putting her career on hold after becoming a mother.
In 1976, two years after Johnson began working as a King Soopers checkout clerk, supervisors offered the management job.
“The retail grocery business is very male-dominated, and still is,” said Carol Mulligan, who became King Soopers’ fifth female manager and regards Johnson as a mentor.
“She had to go where none of us had ever been,” Mulligan said. “I’m not sure she knew how important she was to the rest of us, this little mild-mannered housewife who wanted to be the one who made coffee at the meetings, mother everybody and still run the store.”
As Mulligan recalled, Johnson’s key advice for her protégées was: Wear a smock.
In the 1970s, women’s clothing usually lacked pockets. Johnson compensated by wearing smocks that colleagues found an amusing counterpoint to her polished fingernails and coiffed hair.
Johnson’s only regret about her job came after she retired in 1987. She worried that she bowed out too soon. Though she enjoyed spending time with her husband before he died, she missed her co-workers and customers.
“Fran told me in January that she wished she hadn’t retired,” Mulligan said.
Survivors include daughters Linda Johnson, Judy Askins and Cathy Wolfgang, all of Aurora; brother Wayne Wittner of Monte Vista; and five grandchildren. Her husband and one brother preceded her in death.
A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. today at Living Waters Tabernacle, 1701 S. Sherman St. in Denver.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
