OXFORD, Miss. – For 93 years, University of Mississippi
alumnus Harper Johnson has watched the world change. He
remembers the tracks and locomotives that carried him to
Oxford in 1935 to enroll at the university, and he recalls
the building of highways back then that Ole Miss students
still travel. He saw radio born, then television, and
laughs now at the memory of a professor who told him both
were fads. Behind every change he’s seen, Johnson has seen
something else: engineers.
It’s the career he chose, becoming a successful electrical
engineer and making his home in Greenwood. Now, he hopes to
help other young men and women enjoy similar opportunities,
as he and his late wife, Elsie, have given $321,000 to Ole
Miss to create the Elsie and Harper Johnson Jr. Scholarship
Endowment in the School of Engineering.
In other giving, Johnson is a member of UM’s 1848 Society,
which recognizes alumni and friends of the university who
have either funded or planned a deferred gift, such as a
bequest or a life income plan.
“Mississippi in general is starving for engineers,” Johnson
said. “Without engineers we’re not going to grow. I want to
see Ole Miss grow in the way of engineering. I want to
encourage students from Mississippi to stay in the state.
To keep students in Mississippi, you’ve got to have
something for them. I want to help keep them in engineering
and give them somewhere to go.”
The scholarship will be awarded to full-time electrical
engineering students from Leflore or Tate counties.
“What Elsie and Harper have done is exactly what the state
of Mississippi, and small towns especially, need,” said
Floyd Melton Jr., an attorney in Greenwood and a friend of
Johnson. “The goal of this scholarship is to see kids take
the hard courses, become engineers and come back into our
communities to work and live.”
The son of a lawyer, grandson of a judge and grandson of a
doctor, Johnson said he never had any plans to enter the
family professions. “Mississippi has enough lawyers and
doctors,” he joked.
Early in his life, it was the shop next door to his
father’s law office in Senatobia that intrigued Johnson
most. The store specialized in leatherwork and he spent
many hours there, marveling at how stuff was made,
observing how things worked. When he boarded a train bound
for Ole Miss, he knew engineering was his calling. Johnson
was a quick learner, excelling even in the tough subjects.
“Studying engineering was fun for me,” he said. He had
come to Ole Miss to study electrical engineering, but just
a year into his schooling, the university dropped its
electrical engineering courses. He left Oxford and took a
job in Greenwood with Supreme Instruments, a company that
produced instruments for servicing radios. Johnson worked
at Supreme for one year before heading to Fort Wayne, Ind.,
to finish his degree at Indiana Institute of Technology,
then one of the top engineering schools in the country.
With his diploma in hand, Johnson returned to his job in
Greenwood with Supreme Instruments, eventually working his
way up as head of the service division. After a stint in
the Army Signal Corps during WWII, Johnson went back to
Greenwood and to Supreme, where he met Elsie, and they
married in 1946. When Supreme was bought by Hickok in 1956,
Johnson took a job with Greenwood Utility, working there
until his retirement in 1980. Johnson also helped bring
MathCounts, a national math enrichment program founded by
the National Society of Professional Engineers, to
Greenwood’s middle schools during his career.
“We are grateful for this generous gift, and we are also
appreciative of Harper Johnson’s commitment to the School
of Engineering and to engineering as a profession,” said
Tom Black, development assistant to the engineering dean.
“This scholarship will allow more students to study
engineering and follow in the footsteps of a man who helped
the state of Mississippi grow.”
The gift is part of the university’s MomentUM campaign, a
four-year initiative to raise $200 million. The campaign,
which ends in December 2008, already has raised more than
$180 million for scholarships, graduate fellowships,
faculty support, a basketball practice facility,
residential colleges and a new law school on the Oxford
campus. Also in the plans is a cancer center at the UM
Medical Center in Jackson.
For more information on how to support programs in the
School of Engineering, go to
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/engineering?school/campaign/.