The biography on this site is the family's own account, and the 1931 remembrance is Tillie's own voice. This page adds the history around them: the company, the building, the education movement, and the boardrooms of her era. Every section lists its sources.
The company she kept the books for
On July 11, 1886, Samuel Curtis Johnson, then 53 years old and a former teacher and salesman who had spent decades working jobs across the Midwest without great success, bought the parquet flooring business of the Racine Hardware Manufacturing Company. The first year's net profit was $268.27. Customers kept writing to ask how to care for their fine wood floors (soap and water warped them), so Johnson began mixing wax formulas; Johnson's Prepared Paste Wax followed by 1888, and by 1898 wax was outselling the flooring itself. The firm became "S.C. Johnson & Son" in 1906, when Herbert F. Johnson, Sr. was made a partner.
In 1917 the company created one of America's earliest profit-sharing programs: 193 employees shared $31,250 in its first year. Tillie's remembrance describes that day from the inside, a surprise bonus paid out "in Liberty bonds, War Savings Stamps and cash."
The founder died on December 6, 1919, at age 86. His son Herbert, Sr. led the company until his own sudden death in February 1928, when leadership passed to H.F. Johnson, Jr., then 28 years old, with sales of about $5 million and 500 employees. Through the Depression the company introduced the self-polishing wax Glo-Coat in 1932, and in September 1935 H.F. Jr. flew a Sikorsky S-38 amphibious plane some 15,000 miles round trip from Racine to Fortaleza, Brazil, to secure a sustainable source of carnauba wax. The company remains family-held today, with revenue of roughly $11 billion.
Sources: SC Johnson: Our Founder; SC Johnson: Herbert F. Johnson, Sr.; SC Johnson: The Carnauba Expedition; Wikipedia: S. C. Johnson & Son.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Great Workroom
In July 1936, while Tillie was serving her final years as treasurer, H.F. Johnson, Jr. hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new administration building in Racine. Wisconsin officials doubted Wright's slender "dendriform" columns, nine inches across at the base and opening to eighteen-foot concrete lily pads at the top, so Wright staged a public load test: a prototype column carried some 60 tons, roughly five times what regulators required, before it was pushed to failure. The building opened on April 23, 1939, its Great Workroom lit through miles of Pyrex glass tubing instead of windows.
The Research Tower followed in 1950, and the complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976. It is the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed corporate headquarters still in use, and SC Johnson offers public tours.
Sources: Wikipedia: Johnson Wax Headquarters; SC Johnson: Administration Building; Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
A university at home
The Chautauqua Institution began in 1874 as a summer training camp for Sunday school teachers on Chautauqua Lake, New York, and quickly grew into a national platform for lectures, music, and ideas; Ulysses S. Grant visited in 1875, Booker T. Washington spoke there several times, and William Jennings Bryan was the era's favorite. It still operates every summer.
Its farthest-reaching invention came in 1878: the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, a four-year home reading course in history, literature, and science for people who could not go to college. More than 8,400 people enrolled the first year. By 1900 roughly half a million had enrolled, some 49,000 had earned diplomas, and more than 10,000 local reading circles met in parlors across the country, the majority of their members women. Completing all four years earned a diploma and, for those who could travel to New York, a walk through the golden gate on Recognition Day. It is called the oldest continuous book club in America.
This is the world behind Tillie's own words in the remembrance: the C.L.S.C. was "that university at home which meant so much to those of us who never even thot of going to college." Racine had a Chautauqua assembly of its own from about 1904 to 1913, in a grove off West Sixth Street; William Jennings Bryan headlined its 1903 program.
Sources: Chautauqua Institution; Chautauqua: The C.L.S.C.; JSTOR Daily: The Forgotten Movement That Changed American Women's Lives; Racine History: Chautauqua in Racine, 1903-1913.
First among equals
How rare was a woman in an American boardroom in 1932? Stanford research cited by theBoardlist found that the average Fortune 500 company did not elect its first female director until 1985. The documented early cases all arrived through family: Clara Abbott, on the board of then-private Abbott Laboratories from 1900, was the founder's wife. Josephine Roche took control of Rocky Mountain Fuel in 1928 through stock inherited from her father. And Lettie Pate Whitehead, often called the first female director of a major American corporation, joined The Coca-Cola Company's board in 1934 as the widow of one of its original bottlers.
SC Johnson writes that the company "has sought the counsel of an independent board of directors since 1932." The family record, on the authority of SC Johnson's corporate archivist, places Tillie Thorkelson on that board at its creation: a career employee of some 35 years, related to no one in the company. If so, she preceded Whitehead by two years, and she stands apart from every early example on record, none of whom came to the table without a family tie.
Her whole profession made the same point quietly. Corporate treasurers and accountants of her era were overwhelmingly men; the first women were not made partners at the major American accounting firms until the mid-1960s. And the cause she championed had a name that has since faded: between the suffrage victory of 1920 and the second wave of the 1960s, advocates spoke of "the woman movement," singular, the term historian Nancy Cott traces through the era in The Grounding of Modern Feminism.
Sources: theBoardlist: The First Ladies of Boards (2016); Wikipedia: Clara Abbott; Wikipedia: Josephine Roche; Wikipedia: Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans; SC Johnson: Board of Directors; The CPA Journal: Women Accountants in the 1920s; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale).
The family she came from
Tillie's father, Mathias Thorkelson, was born in 1834 in Finnas, Hordaland, Norway, and settled in Racine in 1856, when the city was becoming one of the most Norwegian and Danish places in America. His obituary in 1909 called him "one of the oldest and most honored men of Racine." In her remembrance Tillie writes that she was working at the Wisconsin Wheel Works, "where my father was the factory superintendent," when S.C. Johnson came to hire her away.
Her brother Halsten Joseph Thorkelson (1875-1953) took two degrees at the University of Wisconsin, taught steam engineering there, rose to professor, and served as the university's business manager from 1914 to 1921 before joining the General Education Board in New York and later becoming a vice president and director of the Kohler Company. His son H. John Thorkelson taught economics at the University of Connecticut, and H. John's sons carried the family into a very different spotlight: the political cartoonist Nick Thorkelson, and Peter Halsten Thorkelson, known to the world as Peter Tork of The Monkees (1942-2019). Tillie was their great-aunt.
Sources: Racine County obituary transcriptions (GenealogyTrails); Prabook: Halsten Joseph Thorkelson; Wikipedia: Peter Tork; Carleton College: Remembering Peter Tork; Nick Thorkelson, Thorkelson Graphics; Max Kade Institute, UW-Madison: Ethnic Groups in Wisconsin.
A note on the record
This site distinguishes carefully between the family record and the public one. Tillie's role as treasurer, her 1937 retirement, and her decades of civic work are documented in her 1956 obituary. Her seat on the 1932 board rests on the family record and SC Johnson's archivist; no independent published roster of that first board has yet been found. If you know of one, the family would welcome it.