Betsy E. Johnson, 70

WILLIAMSTOWN -- Betsy Edens Johnson, gardener, activist, publisher, passionate homemaker, and friend to all she met, died peacefully in her home on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024 after a long journey with frontotemporal dementia. She was 70. Raised in the Chicago suburb of Barrington Hills, Ill., Betsy was the middle daughter of entrepreneurs Ralph, a tent manufacturer, and Sidney, a bookstore owner. After marrying Bill Densmore of Worcester, Mass., she made Williamstown her home for 41 years. She and Bill co-published The Advocate, a newsweekly for the Berkshires and Southwestern Vermont from 1983-1992.

A gathering to celebrate Betsy’s life will be held on Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024 at 3 p.m. at the First Congregational Church in Williamstown. While there will be time and space for tears, attendees are strongly encouraged to wear joyfully bright colors! Donations in memory of Betsy may be made to Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts or to the Berkshire Botanical Garden. More about Betsy’s world, including photos, music, essays and reflections, can be found at

https://tinyurl.com/betsyejohnson

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Betsy enjoyed exploring the great outdoors of Barrington Hills with her four sisters as a child. She first learned how to garden with her beloved father Ralph, the son of Norwegian immigrants. Old neighborhood friends recount how Betsy would fearlessly climb to the highest points of the trees on the 25 acres where she was raised.

She spent many summers in her later youth, both as a camper and counselor, at Camp Osoha in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, where she canoed and hiked in the North Woods. Betsy also cherished the Johnson family cottage on the Lauderdale Lakes in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Known as “Keystone,” this beloved summer destination for swimming and corn-husking remained in the family for four generations.

As a young adult, Betsy attended the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., where she served as president of student government. At Emma, she also learned Spanish, developed a lasting love of photography, and made many lifelong friends. Upon her high school graduation, the Rocky Mountains drew Betsy to Colorado Springs, Colo. and Colorado College. She thrived under CC’s innovative Block Plan, graduating in 1977 with a BA in political science. She also spent one semester of her college career back in her home city of Chicago in an urban studies program. At the time, her father Ralph was deliberately relocating his tent-making company within the city proper as part of an effort to keep industrial jobs in neighborhoods suffering from systemic disinvestment.

Drawn to political engagement in her home state, Betsy returned to Illinois after college. In Springfield, she worked as a constituent manager for a progressive Democratic lawmaker in the state capital. In 1978, a colleague introduced her to Densmore, then reporting on the Illinois legislature for The Associated Press. The couple did their laundry together on their first date—the beginnings of a team that lasted 46 years. Betsy and Bill married on June 13, 1981 in the garden of Betsy’s parents’ home in Barrington Hills.

Before settling in Williamstown, the couple spent time living in San Francisco, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Betsy worked at The Booksmith on Haight Street while they were in San Francisco and trained as a corporate paralegal during the Chicago stint, helping to manage securities compliance work at the law firm of Sidley & Austin. While in Chicago, Betsy also joined the National Organization for Women’s (NOW) field-organizing team in southern Illinois as NOW worked to secure Illinois ratification of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment—a continuation of political activism that was a throughline of her life. The effort failed in 1982 by one vote in the Illinois House and remained elusive until 2018, but Betsy remained an ardent activist until the end, always ready to go to the barricades and protest for just causes, feminist or otherwise.

When the couple lived in New York City, Densmore reported on corporate insurance litigation, and Betsy joined a Park Avenue home goods retailer. While scanning Editor & Publisher magazine one day, Betsy showed Bill a classified ad offering a “New England college-town weekly” for sale. She knew she’d found her next venture.

Betsy and her husband decamped from Brooklyn to the Berkshires to buy and run The Advocate. With her innate charisma, Betsy led the advertising team, while Densmore served as the chief editor. Together, with founding publisher Lauren Stevens and town investors, they tripled the weekly’s circulation and revenue over three years. Each week, the paper featured comprehensive coverage of regional issues, arts, and entertainment as well as local town news for Williamstown. The Advocate was a cornerstone of the community, circulating 21,000 copies to more than 400 locations from Great Barrington, MA, to Manchester, VT, along the U.S. Route 7 corridor. Business owners all over the region loved Betsy for her enthusiastic collaboration on their marketing. In 1991, Betsy & Bill launched The South Advocate in Lenox with new co-partner Eric Bruun.

In late 1992, the couple sold the papers to focus on building a family and enjoy a respite from weekly deadlines. The couple’s son, Christopher Dana Densmore, was born in 1991, followed by their daughter, Eliza Edens Densmore, born in 1993. Betsy was a kind and nurturing mother. Ever present and supportive, she attended every soccer game, ski race, bake sale, school play, and piano lesson with a glowing grin on her face, full of pride and joy for her two kids. She also instilled in her children a love of music, books, and film. A skilled and enthusiastic chef, Betsy improvised admirably with whatever local produce was in season for her kids.

As her kids became more independent, Betsy sold kitchenware and worked as a baker. She eventually found a new calling spending two years maintaining flower beds at the Berkshire Botanical Garden, with particular care for the de Gersdorff Perennial Border. Working at the BBG reignited her childhood passion for gardening and the outdoors, and she began taking night classes in horticulture there as well. Many shelves of gardening-book acquisitions later, she started “Good Gardening,” a professional garden design and maintenance business with clients throughout the Berkshires, which she ran from 2005 through 2018. Betsy impressed peers and clients with her esoteric knowledge of Latin horticultural nomenclature and was enthusiastic in her pursuit of continual professional development. She visited many regional gardening conferences with friends and colleagues in the horticulture community.

Throughout her years in the Berkshires, Betsy was a linchpin of a variety of communities. She volunteered in school classrooms for all ages and helped to facilitate work for the common good with the Williamstown Community Chest, the Capital-area Community Health Plan, and the Williamstown Parent-Teacher Organization. Her lifelong passion for tending the earth also found expression in her adoration of the local CSA Caretaker Farm, for which she was a founding member and where she visited as often as she could to joyfully gossip, pick flowers and gather produce. Always in love with bringing people together for service, activism, food and conversation, Betsy made her large, wrap-around porch alongside Hemlock Brook a popular spot for potluck parties and civic meetings. Community members flocked to her vital mind, infectious laugh, cheerful passion and engaging conversation.

In 2016, Betsy was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), an ultimately fatal neurological disorder of unknown cause, beginning a journey that would progressively take her writing, reading, driving, most movement, and eventually speech. She faced her illness with courage, strength and light, determined to get the most out of life. Stubborn to still “greet the day” (as her father always said) and a true extrovert, she continued to engage with friends until her final months. She took up meditation and walked a mile or more nearly every day while she could. Betsy lived as presently and fully as possible, and her sense of awe at the day-to-day beauties of the world seemed to even increase in the years of her illness. While she could still travel, she visited friends and family in Oregon, Montana, Philadelphia, New York City, Illinois, and Colorado, where she particularly loved to roam the mountains with her beloved college best friend, Janis Hansen.

In January of 2024, some 80 of Betsy’s friends and family gathered to celebrate her 70th year with a massive blowout. With a catered menu of her favorite recipes to make throughout the years and a Western swing house band, Betsy dined and danced joyfully with her loved ones.

Betsy managed to remain in her home of 37 years until her passing, and a fantastic team of empathetic caregivers facilitated her many transitions. After a final month in bed, she passed peacefully in her home in the evening of Sept. 28, holding the hands of her two children while they blessed her with poetry and showered her with love and affection. Betsy will be dearly missed but her exuberant spirit and legacy will endure and flourish. She was exceptionally gifted at connecting with people from all walks of life with genuine charm and curiosity, and channeled her family legacy of entrepreneurial spirit and community-building into her life passions of gardening, cooking, and being with people. As a lifelong friend said after her birthday party, “If you made a Venn diagram of Williamstown, Betsy would be right at the center.” She spread joy and laughter everywhere she went and had a distinctly goofy sense of humor and luminous spirit that will be missed.

Betsy leaves her husband of 43 years, Bill Densmore of Williamstown, Mass., son Christopher Dana Densmore of Missoula, Montana, daughter Eliza Edens Densmore of Brooklyn, N.Y., and four sisters: Sharon Minter of Florida, Lauren Johnson of Naples, Fla., Paula Kay Johnson of Barrington Hills, Ill., and Martha Johnson of Crystal Lake, Ill