Remembering Sally Johnston, a ‘tireless force for goodness’ in Vail

In Sally Johnston’s home, there was always room for one more at the table.

Many children in Vail’s formative years learned as much, often finding a hot meal and a place to sleep at Room 300 in the Christiana Lodge where the Johnston family lived.

“She was a fount of unconditional love,” said Mike Johnston, the youngest of the two Johnston boys who is now the mayor of Denver. “She wanted our house to be the place where everybody came and visited. So, it was where kids came over for a Friday night. It was where we all ended up at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. It was where you had sleepovers. Even all the way into high school, it was where everybody came to relax and feel like it was their home also.”

That home is where friends of the Johnston boys stayed when their families fell on hard times. Mike Johnston said one of his childhood friends stayed for nearly six months in the first grade while his mother was hospitalized with a serious back injury. Others came and went throughout the years, and the door was always open.

“She had a deep sense of welcoming and kind of walked through life with open arms,” Mike Johnston said. “I think most of the kids of my generation feel like she probably helped raise them too.”

Sally Johnston, who died in May surrounded by family at her Vail home, also helped raise Vail. A memorial service will take place Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Vail Interfaith Chapel, and the community is welcome to attend.

After years working as a teacher, Sally Johnston cashed out her pension in 1976 for the down payment on the Christiana, moving the family from Oklahoma back to Vail, where she and her husband, Paul, had first met. In the following decades, she served on numerous boards and was instrumental in developing the Vail Mountain School, the Shaw Cancer Center and the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater. She and Paul, who served on the Vail Town Council for more than a decade and was the town’s mayor from 1983 to 1987, were also instrumental in Vail landing the 1989 World Alpine Ski Championships.

But outside all the board meetings, and the community organizing, Mike Johnston said his mother’s greatest gift was being able to find the one person in any room who needed her help the most.

“She was a teacher by her first profession and worked with kids with different sorts of emotional disabilities,” Mike Johnston said. “She had a keen eye to look out for the person who needed you the most. Who was the person who was sitting alone in the corner or who was the person who was struggling or needed the most help? She had a deep capacity to find people who felt like they were broken and try to bind them back together.”

Her relentless optimism rubbed off on others. At the Vail Mountain School commencement each year, the member of the senior class who most embodies Sally Johnston’s spirit of service to others is honored with the award bearing her name. It’s the school’s highest student achievement.

“I think if we ever failed to be kind to someone else, she was the first to say anything,” Mike Johnston said. “She used to say you never want to make someone else feel small. You always want to make them feel big. And I think that was both what you did by example and what you did by direct instruction, certainly to my brother and me and our friends.”

A selfless, fearless spirit

Born in Lyon Falls, New York, Johnston was one of four girls in a skiing-obsessed family. Though everyone called her Sally, her birth name was Sarah.

After college, she worked as a music teacher before working with students with severe emotional disabilities. Mike Johnston said his mother would tell stories about working in inner-city Boston schools in the ’50s and ’60s where she would make seating assignments based on gang affiliations.

“She’d get her car turned over in the parking lot each night and come back each morning and do it all over again,” he said.

She also traveled in Soviet Russia in the 1950s as a single woman in her 20s, and had her cameras seized by Russian soldiers who thought she was a spy.

“She just had a certain sense of fearlessness and selflessness that you seldom find together,” Mike Johnston said.

Sally met Paul through her sister, Renie Gorsuch, who had moved to Vail in 1963 just as the town and the resort were getting up and running. Renie opened Gorsuch’s Ski Store in the Clocktower building, where Paul had a nightclub called the Nu Gnu in the basement. Sally came to Vail to visit her sister and friends and wound up meeting her future husband.

After getting married, the pair moved to Oklahoma where they welcomed two sons, John and Michael. In 1976, they headed back to the mountains after buying the Christiana.

‘They just cared about people’

Paul Johnston, as a longtime member of the Town Council and the town’s mayor for three years, was often out front while his wife worked in the background. But Mike Johnston said nobody could motivate people to help or join a cause like his mother, who he has repeatedly called a “tireless force for goodness.”

If there was a motto for the family, it was the quote that used to hang in the house that read: “The world has yet to see what one man can do if he doesn’t care if he gets the credit.”

“That was certainly what my mom and dad’s disposition was,” Mike Johnston said. “I think they gave everything every day, not because they cared about people knowing what they did or cared about getting the credit, but they just cared about people. And I think particularly my mom, because my dad was mayor, people presumed that she was somehow in the background, and she didn’t mind that. But I often find that many more people knew and loved my mom and got called into or roped into some sort of civil service because they loved her and believed in her and she inspired people.”

It’s an enduring legacy in the town they helped create.

“I think a big part of the way it feels to walk down the street in Vail today is, to me, the way it feels to walk down holding my mom or my dad’s hand, which just feels like a place where you want to be welcomed and you want to raise kids or take your family on vacation,” Mike Johnston said. “I think they were trying to build that over decades.”

Sally Johnston is survived by her two sons, John and Mike, Paul Johnston Jr. and Michelle (Johnston) Maloney, 11 grandkids, seven great grandkids and her two sisters, Renie Gorsuch and Judie Conn.