Obituaries : Eleanor Johnson; Founder of the Weekly ‘Reader’

Eleanor Johnson, founder of the Weekly Reader, a classroom newspaper with a circulation of 9 million, has died at 94. Miss Johnson died Thursday at her home in Gaithersburg, a spokesman for the newspaper said Friday.

Miss Johnson conceived the idea for the newspaper and developed its format and editorial content. She was a public school teacher in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania before publishing the first Weekly Reader on Sept. 21, 1928.

Originally called My Weekly Reader, the publication has come out ever since and is read by more than 40% of the nation’s elementary school children. Two-thirds of all Americans were exposed to the paper at some point in their school years, according to its publisher, Field Publications of Middletown, Conn.

“She had a deep understanding of how to connect students to the world and how to help a teacher get the most from a group of 30 squirming children on Friday afternoon,” said Terry Borton, the paper’s editor-in-chief.

Miss Johnson, who also was a visiting professor at Columbia University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Chicago, served as a consultant to the newspaper after her semi-retirement in 1969. She was actively involved in the newspaper through 1978, when she was 85.