Florence Mary Johnston, a former longtime resident of Pacific Palisades, died peacefully in her sleep at home on December 3. She was 90 years old. Born on March 8, 1919, in Newark, New Jersey, Flo attended Rutgers University. She married her first husband, Emil Robert (Phillip) Oswald in 1939, and had three children. When the couple divorced, Flo moved with her children back with her parents. She worked at several jobs and put herself through night school to support the children. She met her second husband, John Johnston, when she worked at RCA in Harrison, New Jersey. John was an engineer and Flo worked for one of the executives and arranged company parties at such venues as The Cotton Club in New York City. Flo came West when John enlisted in the Navy; the two lived on Coronado Island in San Diego. She later relocated to the Santa Monica area and took classes at Santa Monica College in real estate and ceramics. She kept the latter as a hobby but got bitten by the real estate bug and sold residential real estate in Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Brentwood for 40+ years. Flo worked for the Margaret Lightfoot and George Elkins real estate companies before opening Ina & Flo Realty with Ina Archambault and eventually the Flo Johnston Real Estate firm, all in Pacific Palisades. Never forgetting her roots in ward politics in New Jersey, Flo was active in the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club and the Human Relations Council. One Fourth of July, in the early 1970s, Flo and her family helped build a float for the town parade out of giant photographs of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Flo was never one to back down from expressing and living her belief in the liberal philosophy she supported. In the early 1960s she helped a biracial couple buy her home in the Palisades and was criticized for it. Long before mainstream thought accepted ‘equality’ as a right, she had acted on principle and was later admired for her courage. Many celebrities became real estate clients. Among them were singer-songwriter, Paul Simon, Al Jardine from the Beach Boys, and Ryan O’Neal, then of ‘Peyton Place’ fame. Some of her club members who also became clients included a Nobel Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize novelist as well as the head of The Rand Corporation and the Chancellor of UCLA. Flo was a voracious reader of anything by Agatha Christie or P.D. James. She loved animals, especially her cats, Max, No No and Cinnamon, and was active as a longtime member of the International Geranium Society, the Altrusa service organization, and the Just Us service club in Santa Monica. Flo renovated each of the homes her family lived-in (on Fiske, Via De La Paz and Monument), and built her last home on Erskine Drive, overlooking Temescal Canyon. She is survived by her beloved younger brother, William McGarry of Fairport, New York; her children, Kathy Tapley (husband Lee) of Roseburg, Oregon, Michael Johnston (wife Marie) of Lakewood, California, Sheila Smith of Camarillo and Ken Johnston (wife Cecelia) of Colorado Springs; 14 grandchildren, and 7 great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her parents, Hazel (Wicks) and Bernard McGarry; her sister Bernice Owles; her first husband Emil Robert Oswald, and her grandchild Martin Crepeau Johnston. For the last 10 years, Flo lived in Lakewood with her son, Michael, and his family (including Marie’s mother, Dorica Ates Jumawan’all of whom joined together and selflessly cared for Flo. Any correspondence can be sent care of Ken Johnston, P.O. Box 1492, Monument, Colorado 80132.
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