J. Theodore ‘Ted’ Johnson, Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Kansas, a longtime Mensa member, and namesake of the Theodore Talks lecture series, passed away in the quiet moments of dawn Sunday. Mary, his bride of 65 years, asked me to share this with his Mensa family.
I met him some years back and was immediately struck by him. For you see, Ted was a thinker. A deep thinker. I can’t tell you how few people like him I have met in my life. We got on like a house afire.
For Ted, life was all about noticing and contemplating new connections. Intelligence, he told me, is a word created from Latin roots for “in-between” and “to select, to choose”. Ted had said: “Intelligent people seek the intellectual mortar in-between the connections.”
“It’s very playful. It’s like when you are in kindergarten, when you can play with blocks, except here (the University) we’re playing with ideas. How do you put them together?”
That pretty much sums up every conversation I ever had with Ted.
“The Greeks invented everything and left it to us to work out the details.”
— Ted Johnson
As a young man he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and in 1958 took up residence at the Medieval Center in Poitiers (France), where he became devoted to the study of medieval France.
His first faculty position was at Princeton University, but in 1968 he accepted a position at the University of Kansas, where he taught French language and literature courses at every academic level, plus an honors tutorial on the interrelations of humanities and the arts. He specialized in 19th- and 20th-century poetry, especially Proust, and the interrelations of literature and the visual arts.
His son Stephen shared these thoughts upon his father Ted’s passing:
In honor of his brilliant mind and his beautiful soul, we’d like to imagine that he is now engaged in Socratic dialogues revolving around a wide spectrum of ideas and philosophies located on a campus somewhere among the stars in the ever-expanding universe. And perhaps too, that a newly formed star up there in the nighttime sky tonight might just be his twinkling, bright blue eyes shining down on all of us with love, light, and joy.
We are going to miss him.
Brad Lucht
Life Member, American Mensa
Editor’s note: This article in memory of a wonderful friend and legendary member of Mid-America Mensa, Ted Johnson, was submitted to me in the form of an email message this afternoon. RIP Ted Johnson and thanks for all of the memories!
