Emma Lue Drake Johnson was a teacher until the end.

During the last months of her life, though she was ill, she was still correcting her daughter's grammar and lecturing a caregiver's baby about going to college, saying, "That will help you deal with life's adversities."

"I would sit there spellbound listening to her," daughter Karen Johnson said. "That teacher part of her was always with her."

Johnson was a highly regarded, beloved, even feared music educator who is credited with inspiring numerous local kids to become professional musicians. She was also one of the first women in Hawai'i to enlist in the Women's Army Corps during World War II. In the 1970s, as vice president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, she dared to take on Gov. John Burns during the teachers strike.

Johnson died on Jan. 15 at the age of 89. Services for her will be held today at Punchbowl.

She was born in Colorado, raised in Wagoner, Okla., and graduated from Northeastern State, a teacher's college. Her brother-in-law had a job installing the first streetlights in Hilo town, and that was her connection to a job teaching at Hilo Intermediate. She later moved to Roosevelt High School, and after serving in the war, became band director at McKinley.

She is the one who insisted a teenage Gabe Baltazar audition for a scholarship to the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan and she pushed many of her students to attend the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

Ronald Baltazar, retired Punahou band teacher and Royal Hawaiian Band assistant director and the younger brother of Gabe, says many musicians credit Johnson for demanding excellence. "She made my brother play that solo and he won," Baltazar said. "That was the start of Gabe, and he's our oldest brother, so we all followed him."

Baltazar says the list of Johnson's accomplished music students includes clarinetist Harold Nakao, who served more than 30 years in the "President's Own" U.S. Marine Corps Band; the late Dr. Kenneth Kawashima, educator and bandmaster of the Royal Hawaiian Band; Norman Baltazar, director of the Kailua High School Band; George Nomura, former band teacher of Waipahu High School; and marimba great Arthur Lyman. Johnson played every instrument but had won a scholarship on the marimba.

She was a tiny lady, just 4 feet 11, but Baltazar remembers her fearlessly taking on the huge tuba players. "She would grab them and shake them and tell them, 'You guys better shape up or get out of this band!' So McKinley at that time had a really good band."

Indeed, she had been a state champion wrestler in high school, but her power had more to do with her presence and the respect her students felt for her than her physical strength.

"I remember being a little girl of 7 or 8 years old and I had to go to school with her," Karen said. "We went into the band room and it was just deafening noise and she picked up her baton and went 'tap tap tap' and it was dead silence."

Johnson believed anything that was worth doing had to be done well. If her students were trying out for select band, she wanted them all to play first chair. If they wanted to pursue music after high school, she helped them get into the best Mainland colleges. She would make students come to her house to practice playing solos while she accompanied them on piano — a rigorous and nerve-wracking experience for young musicians, but it was how they learned the repertoire of their instrument.

"Evidently she was popular with her students because they all gave her their graduation photos," Karen says. "And she kept them all."

Later in her career, she became a special-education teacher at Kalihi Waena. She would bring home students from disadvantaged backgrounds for family meals, and, her daughter remembers, "They inherited many things — clothes, toys and so on — from my brother and I that we no longer used — and sometimes even if we did use it.

"It showed us as kids what giving was all about."

She started her teaching career as Miss Drake and later became Mrs. Johnson when she married Clyde Robert Johnson, an Army Corps of Engineers accountant, in 1951. The couple adopted son Robert and daughter Karen in Germany while stationed abroad. They came home to Hawai'i and built their house in Honolulu. Clyde Johnson died in 2006.

Karen says her mother tried to get her to be a musician, but it didn't take. "I think of her talent and I ache for that blood in my veins," she said. But the lessons that did stick are about fearlessness, commitment, effort and courage.

"My mother was never a quitter. Never."

"Even if they didn't take up music, her students learned character from her that would have served them their whole life," Baltazar said.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.