I'm frequently asked about my own experiences as a reporter - "What was your biggest story?" "What story did you enjoy writing most of all?"

But more often I'm asked, "didn't you get to meet the most interesting people?"

The answer is always "yes". But my listener is always disappointed when I add: "But most of them never got their name in a newspaper."

THIS WORLD IS populated by "little people," quiet, unobtrusive, plodding, hard-working, home-loving little people who live up to their obligations, discharge their responsibilities and meet personal challenges without fanfare or receiving any medals.

They live, they love, they laugh and they cry sometimes, too. Most of them rear families, help others in need, comfort the sick, counsel the young, assist the aged, work in the community and by and large live useful meaningful lives.

They suffer in solitude and die almost in anonymity. But among them you find the real heroes and heroines of life. One of them died in Denver last week.

She was Mrs. Edna (Roni) Johnson of Lusk, Wyo., a very dear friend of mine who courageously fought a years-long battle against heart disease and never once knuckled down to it.

RONI UNDERWENT open heart surgery - her second in recent years - at St. Luke's Hospital. She was confident the operation would be successful when I visited her the night before surgery.

"I'll be in intensive care for three days," she predicted, "then I'll be out there walking the halls. I'll be damned if I'll let this thing get me down.

It hadn't before, nor during the years after the first operation, and Roni Johnson wasn't about to surrender. She went to sleep that night smiling, confident and full of her usual fight.

Roni was born in Mississippi, but she married and moved to Wyoming long enough ago to have completely fallen in love with the wide open spaces of that state. A walking chamber of commerce, she sang the praises of the little town of Lusk. She was only a little bit taller than five feet, but she's fight anyone who maligned her state or town.

Roni's husband, Harleigh, died of a heart attack, but she later remarried and then divorced. She raised two sons, George, a chief warrant officer with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army of Fort Rucker, Ala., and Yoy, a staff sergeant at Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.

BUT CARING FOR her late husband's business as an independent servicing Wyoming oil fields posed a strain on her. She too, developed heart trouble, had open heart surgery in Denver and couldn't wait to get home.

Her doctor told her to be active. She already was. She got a job with Willard's Drug Store in Lusk, walked, learned to swim, put on her own storm windows in the fall, painted the interior of her immaculately clean home as often as possible, took part in Elks Club activities as a member of the Elks Does and was as lively as the humming bird outside her window.

She had an unconquerable zest for life, loved to dance, entertain her many friends and pop up at parties in nearby cities. On her visits to Denver for periodic physical examinations, she drove her own car, enjoyed the shows and the night clubs. No prude, she liked an occasional nip and always a good laugh.

HER EXAM A FEW months ago disclosed some deterioration. Finally it reached the red-alert stage, and Roni entered the hospital last Saturday. She was operated on Monday and died Tuesday.

Last Friday was a beautiful, radiantly sunshiny day in Lusk. It was the kind of day Roni Johnson enjoyed most - a day which, during drag hours in the drugstore, she would stand on the sidewalk and chat and laugh with ranchers and cowboys or townsfolk and roughnecks from the oil fields.