Cheryl Johnson grew up dreaming of working in an air-conditioned office as a secretary.
She got her wish, and completed more than 45 years of service to the UI this year when she retired July 31 as a supervisor of administrative services in the Division of Public Safety.
“My love affair with the university began as a teenager,” said Johnson, who grew up on a farm not far from Fisher. She has fond memories of cruising around campus with her friends when traffic patterns were slightly different than they are now.
After graduating from Fisher High School in 1964, she landed her first job at the UI: part-time secretary for wrestling coach B.R. Patterson in Kenney Gym.
She completed a 12-month program at the Illinois Commercial College at Fourth and Green streets in Champaign and got her first full-time job at the UI’s security office in 1965.
Johnson said the biggest changes she witnessed at the UI were the ones for technology. The change from using a manual typewriter at her first job to seeing the advent of digital storage and the Internet was a pretty big one.
“It was a huge change from the ’60s to now,” she said. “Just the way you processed things – we didn’t have copiers or computers.”
One time years ago, a student worker came to her with a piece of onionskin copy paper she’d found in a filing cabinet and asked what it was. Johnson explained that the paper was used with typewriters to make copies that would go into storage files.
She recalled the days when you learned not to make mistakes in typing class, and to work quickly. She remembers using typewriter erasers, and later tape that could be used to correct mistakes.
The idea of a word processer that could quickly erase mistakes was revolutionary – if a bit intimidating at first.
“I could repair a typewriter,” she said, remembering when computers were first introduced into offices in the 1980s.
But any time something went wrong with her computer, she had to call a specialist for help.
“That was the hard part,” she said.
Johnson’s career at the UI took her to the Dean of Women’s office from October 1966 to September 1969, and to the new Office of Investigations in 1969, located at McKinley Hospital. The office moved to North Mathews Avenue in the early ’70s. She was secretary to the chief of police from 1974 to the late 1980s and then promoted to her last position.
Chief of Police Paul Dollins urged her to go back to school and earn a bachelor’s degree, but she was hesitant at first.
In time, his advice stuck. She began taking classes in 1981 and finished her bachelor’s degree in business administration from Eastern Illinois University in 1990.
Johnson said Dollins was just one supervisor and mentor out of many great ones she had at the UI. She counts herself fortunate to have worked with so many outstanding people, including current director of Public Safety and Chief of Police Barbara O’Connor.
Deciding to retire was hard, Johnson said.
It was difficult to leave the staff of 20 she supervised and many colleagues had become close friends.
“I feel like I was a part of the law enforcement community,” she said, not only of the UI department, but also of others in the Urbana and Champaign police departments. “We’ve all got a special bond.”
The trade-off has been worth it, said Johnson, who now gets to spend her afternoons with her grandsons, Carter, 5, and Nolan, 4, who live in Mahomet near her and her husband, John, who also recently retired.
She has time to plan gingerbread haunted house crafts, and to go on fall walks with them, which she relishes.
Johnson also has enjoyed having extra time to spend in her yard gardening. “This is the first summer I had time to do that,” she said.