Obituary July 16, 1941, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
From Gauss and his Children
JOHNS, George Sibley (1857-1941)
GEORGE S. JOHNS A long, richly successful life ended this morning in the death of George S Johns.
It was a life professionally lived in the service of the Post-Dispatch over a span of 44 years.
The paper was five years old when young George Johns hammered his way into the news room as a reporter. He brought to the job a Princeton education, a brief experience as a publisher of a country weekly at St. Charles and a blazing enthusiasm. He brought budding principles, also, which were to flower into a sharply defined, resolute philosophy in the militant atmosphere of his workaday environment.
The dominant note of that philosophy was love of justice; it was his ruling passion. The corollary was inescapable -- hatred of intolerance. And when he came into the responsibility of editor of the the editorial page, to which his talents and ambition unerringly pointed, he found the pulpit from which to preach day after day, through spirited, exciting years, the gospel of "the fighting editor" he never ceased to be.
Under the mentorship of the elder Pulitzer, whom he regarded, as he once said, "not as an individual but an institution, a great exacting school of journalism," the editor's culture broadened and flowed deep. If he had a specialty, it was the Constitution of the United States. Without irreverence, that character had become a religion. He was steeped in its history, not merely the minutes of the Philadelphia convention, so pregnant with destiny thought they were, but with the vast epic of antecedent vision and martyrdom out of which the American Bill of Rights was sacrosanct. Any assault, or invasion, or subversion of its purpose or purport was to him a heresy to be exposed as such, denounced as such and as such repulsed.
Intimates spoke of him affectionately, in the ripening years, as "Old Fundamental." But to his office associates, and socially, and convivially, too, he was always "Mr. Johns." The formality connoted no offishness, no st9lted aloofness. To the bright contrary, his was a bright and festive person, a promoter of revelry as well as a dependable participant. To the St. Louis of ambrosial tradition, enriched by the now legendary wit and badinage of our intellectual troubadours, Mr. Johns was a merry and constant contributor.
The fighting editor loved life, loved people, loved the good earth's seasonal beauty. The white flowering of the shadbush, first to plume the winter's barren leave-taking, was ceremoniously observed at Mr. Johns' country home, Crag Darragh. Presently the wild plum would haunt the burgeoning night, and soon the whole rapturous rush of spring unleashed by April's magic. They were all dear friends of Mr. Johns, along with the quail's welcomed whistle, the thrush's silver lyric, the robin's possessive strut, and, beyond a rugged thrust of almost primeval forest, green hills melting into blue horizons.
In such enchantment gently passed the years of the fighting editor's retirement.
Source
Clipping from the Elizabeth Burchsted collection, although additional copies are found in the Skip & Winston Johns collection. Transcribed to softcopy by Susan D. Chambless, 2008.
