WOMAN'S LIFE FULL OF ADVENTURE

Mary Johnson Tweedy's death Saturday in Manhattan at 80 ended a life that began in ivy-covered security in Cape Girardeau but was as rich in exotic adventure as, in the words of a childhood friend, "a 25-cent book."

Tweedy grew up Mary Virginia Johnson, the red-haired daughter of Caroline and B.F. Johnson. Her father, affectionately known as "Peggy" because of his artificial leg, was the chairman of the mathematics department at then-Southeast Missouri State College.

Though she jousted with him continuously, Tweedy loved her father dearly, says childhood friend Mary McGill. McGill's parents, history department chairman William T. Doherty and his wife, played bridge with the Johnsons almost every Saturday night and brought their children along.

McGill recalled a Saturday night when Mr. Johnson perversely decided that the customary practice of giving the children a nickel to go down to I. Ben Miller's for ice cream was foolishness.

"Mary Virginia, ... you don't have the slightest conception of money," Mr. Johnson said.

That made his daughter so angry that when Mr. Johnson opened his tobacco pouch she spit in it.

"It scared me so bad. It terrified me what she did," McGill remembered. "I ran to the bottom of the hill I was so scared."

Soon, along came her friend Mary Virginia. "She had a nickel in her hand," McGill said. "She won that bout."

After graduating from Southeast in 1936, the young woman flew to New York bent on asking Henry Luce for a job. Picking her out from a Depression-era line of applicants stretching around the block, Luce made her Time's first woman correspondent.

She was stranded in Poland when Germany and Russia signed their non-aggression pact prior to World War II, hopping a troop train to Sweden and stowing away on a ship bound for New York.

She also worked as a Washington correspondent and was a staff member of "The March of Time" newsreel. She held the title of assistant to the executive vice president of Time, Inc.

Perhaps Tweedy's greatest adventure occurred in 1945, a year after she married Gordon Bradford Tweedy. A lawyer, he was director of an airline flying supplies across "The Hump" from India to support Chinese troops during World War II.

One day on their way to Kashmir, their plane became lost in the Himalayas and they were forced to parachute. They found each other an hour after landing at 14,000 feet on the side of a mountain.

She wrote about their frozen ordeal for Life magazine, the story appearing shortly after their daughter Clare died.

A woman who never acquired formal education beyond her undergraduate degree from Southeast, Tweedy was devoted to educational ideals. She was in charge of Time's education department from 1953 to 1965, and was on the board of Robert College in Istanbul, Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass., the Asian Institute of Technology Foundation in Bangkok and others.

If Tweedy indeed had no conception of money, she was generous with hers. She and her husband endowed the William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Mr. Tweedy's alma mater.

He died in 1985.

She donated more than $1 million to various projects at Southeast. Among those were an addition to North Hall, now known as B.F. Johnson Hall, mostly used for computer science instruction; the Carrie Woodburn Johnson Library Endowment; the Johnson Faculty Centre, created from the former Johnson family home at 530 N. Pacific; and the Mary Johnson Tweedy Fund, which endows landscaping in the area surrounding the Johnson Faculty Centre.

Dr. Bill Stacy, who was president of Southeast when the faculty center was dedicated, said she talked to him early in his presidency about her father and his love of math and the coming computer revolution. The donations she made were at her own instigation, Stacy said.

"Nothing she ever did was not her idea. She was in charge."

Said Dr. Robert Foster, executive director of the University Foundation, "She was one of these persons who, when she had a good idea, would send money to implement her idea."

In 1988, when Tweedy came to Cape Girardeau to dedicate the Johnson Faculty Centre, she led McGill inside to show her a surprise. There on the door leading to the living room was a plaque designating the "Johnson and Doherty Bridge Room."