Before Oliver Davis Johns became a Rhodes Scholar, he was a teenage radio engineer saving money to get to MIT.

He recalled getting up at 5 a.m., driving to Wewoka and putting the local station on the air. His work also included announcing and hosting an afternoon music program.

“We had something in the afternoon called Postcard Parade where people would send in postcards requesting songs and we would play them and read the postcard,” Johns said.

Within a few years, the young man earning his way toward college would become president of his senior class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appear in Life magazine and receive a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. He remains the only former Seminole Junior College student to become a Rhodes Scholar.

Johns and the late Oklahoma Gov. David Boren are the two Seminole High School graduates who received Rhodes Scholarships. Both studied at Oxford’s Balliol College, Johns beginning in 1956 and Boren in 1963.

Now 91, Johns can trace that path through a year of college classes close to home, a demanding scientific education and a career spent researching physics and helping other students learn it.

As a teenager, his main interest was amateur radio. He passed an examination in Oklahoma City to earn a first-class radiotelephone license, qualifying him for professional radio engineering work. He worked at Seminole’s KSMI and later at KWSH in Wewoka.

The work gave him a way to save for the university he wanted to attend. His first college classes, however, were in the building he already knew.

Johns graduated from Seminole High School in 1951, a year early, and spent the 1951-52 academic year at Seminole Junior College. He took advanced algebra and physics before entering MIT in 1952.

He remembered the physics laboratory on the high school’s third floor, cleaning out a classroom storeroom and building a piece of equipment for the school. He also remembered an instructor who had taken leave from graduate study to teach in Seminole.

That preparation mattered when Johns arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among classmates whose high schools had already offered calculus.

“And I got top grades at MIT right from the start because I was so well prepared,” he said.

MIT’s first-year courses were rigorous and carefully coordinated. Johns remembered learning a concept in calculus the week before he needed it in physics. He lived in the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house, which helped ease the move from Oklahoma.

“It suited me perfectly,” he said of MIT’s structured approach.

By his senior year, Johns had been elected class president. His graduating class was drawing attention well beyond campus as industry and government competed to recruit scientists and engineers.

Life devoted the cover of its May 7, 1956, issue to MIT and a feature titled “The Need for Better Scientists and MIT’s Answer.” Photographer Gjon Mili photographed the Class of 1956 assembled in the lobby of Building 7. The coverage reported starting salary offers 10 percent above the previous year’s offers.

Johns appeared in the coverage as a physics student, senior class president and Rhodes Scholar. His portrait is preserved in the MIT Museum’s collection.

He remembered his class as the most recruited in MIT’s history, with the Cold War driving demand for its graduates.

“More businesses wanted more people to hire because of the Cold War,” Johns said. While employers were pursuing his classmates, Johns was preparing to continue his education overseas.

Oliver Davis Johns, then senior class president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Rhodes Scholar, is photographed for Life magazine’s May 7, 1956, feature on MIT and the demand for scientists and engineers.

His father, Seminole Public Schools Superintendent Oliver Daniel “O.D.” Johns, had initially inquired about a Rotary fellowship. Savoie Lottinville, director of the University of Oklahoma Press and a former Rhodes Scholar, encouraged an application for the Rhodes Scholarship instead and helped guide Johns through the process.

The selection took him to New Orleans for an interview. Johns recalled being pressed about charitable work he had done with his fraternity. When the interviewers suggested the work had been limited, he answered, as he remembered it, “well, we did the best we could.”

He credited his debate training in Seminole with helping him maintain his composure. Evenings spent standing before others and arguing an issue had given him practice for an interview in which his answers were challenged.

The result still surprised him.

“I remember being surprised that I won because I didn’t think I’d done that well,” he said.

Johns graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1956 and spent the next three years at Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford, he earned a degree in mathematics in 1958 and another in physics in 1959.

He remembered strong tutors and the experience of living among people whose abilities continually impressed him.

“Oxford is one of those places where everybody walking down the street assumes that everybody else there is smarter than they are,” he said. “And in some cases they’re right.”

After Oxford, Johns continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He stepped away from graduate school for a period, worked as a senior research physicist in industry and later returned to complete his doctorate in physics in 1968.

His research subsequently took him to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the Technical University of Munich and the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris. An encounter with astrophysicist Hubert Reeves at a conference in Italy helped draw him into nuclear astrophysics, studying how heavy elements form in stellar explosions.

The questions had expanded considerably from the radio equipment he worked with in Oklahoma. His career also brought him back to the classroom, this time as the person preparing students for what came next.

Johns joined San Francisco State University in 1978 and became a professor of physics. He also served as graduate coordinator, helping students continue their education. His teaching received a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award in 2001. The university lists him as emeritus beginning in 2004.

“I think that I helped a lot of students,” he said.

After retirement, he wrote Analytical Mechanics for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, published by Oxford University Press in 2005, with a second edition in 2011. The book examines the mathematical foundations of mechanics and their connections to relativity and quantum theory.

Oxford remained part of his work long after the Rhodes Scholarship. In the book’s acknowledgments, he noted that substantial portions were written during visits to Oxford’s Department of Theoretical Physics and Wolfson College.

“I didn’t really retire,” Johns said.