When President John F. Kennedy appointed Florence Johnson First Class Postmaster in 1961, she was one of only nine women in Florida to hold that office. Johnson was Englewood's longest serving Postmaster, serving for nineteen years.
She began in 1951 as a part-time employee when the post office, in a surplus Army barracks, had only 400 post office boxes. Since there was no home delivery, people came in to pick up their mail. They left their old magazines on a table in the lobby for others.
Although she was not postmaster yet, she brought modern mail service to Englewood. All the street names and house numbers had to be identified and mailboxes erected to prepare for home mail delivery. The fire department assisted in this job. Johnson and her husband planned the carrier routes and marked an area map with arrows to show the direction the carrier would be driving on every street so people would know on which side of the road to put their mailboxes. By 1960, Englewood had home mail delivery, which by June 1962 serviced 1,600 households.
Johnson retired in 1980 after twenty-nine years of postal work.
After a major fire, the Englewood community bought a fire truck in 1949, and organized the Englewood Volunteer Fire Department, but there was no government funding for it. Johnson was one of eleven women who formed a club to raise money for fire equipment. Their first purchase was two sirens, one for each end of town, to call the volunteer firemen. The women jokingly called themselves the Sirens. The Sirens expanded into the Ladies Auxiliary Fire Department, which was chartered November 1, 1951, with 101 members. Johnson was their first president.
Her unpublished manuscript is the first known history of Englewood. It is the basis for The History of Early Englewood by Jo Cortes.