John Johnson

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I was born May 7, 1939 to John Roy Johnson and Pauline Fields Johnson at our home in Whitesville, Boone County, W.Va. and my father was a coalminer there for six years. we then moved in the summer of 1944 to Liberty, Liberty county, Texas where we rented a small two room "shotgun" style house in town and dad walked to work as a mechanic trainee and back each day at the Packard car dealership owned by the mayor, Bill Trotti. We didn't have mail delivery for some reason, so mom would walk me and my two year old brother Barry downtown to the post office to pick up our mail from general delivery at the inside window counter and as we did so in April 1945, the postman at the window told us that President Franklin D Roosevelt had just died and mama broke into tears and cried heartbroken at the news. That summer we rented a five room home on Independence Drive about two miles south of the town and next door to M.P.Daniels' widow, Mrs. Nannie Daniels and her single daughter Ms. Ellen Daniels and Mrs. Daniels' son Price who lived on the other side of her house from us. Price Daniels Sr. was then a local lawyer that went on to become Texas' attorney-general and then governor of Texas. He later became a federal court judge and my dad said that insofar as our dealings with buying our house from his mother, he handled everything very honestly and straightforward. I went ten years of school in Liberty and was in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Golden Gloves amateur boxing, was baptized into the Church of Christ at 12 years old, played high school football, ran track as a miler, not because I was competitive but the coaches wanted me to keep my weight down for football, threw the shot put and played trombone in the concert band after football season was over and sang in the school choir. My folks then bought another house in town at 2662 Cornell St. and sold the one on Independence Drive about 1952 and then in 1955 bought another home in Hardin about ten miles north of Liberty and we moved there that summer. Dad rented our house in Liberty for the next two years and I went to Hardin High School, played football, played trombone in the concert band and bought and drove a 1931 Ford Model-A 2 dor coupe to school and part-time work on weekends at Pat Johnson's Gulf service station (no kin to me) . I graduated in May of 1957 and we then moved back to our house in Liberty and sold the house in Hardin. I worked that summer at the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company plant near Wallisville, Texas in a contract labor pipe gang putting 4 inch pipe joints 15 feet long together or breaking them back apart to be used again somewhere else in the sulphur production fields. I saved most of my summer earnings and enrolled at Lamar State School of Technology in Beaumont, Texas and rented a room in a private home about 8 blocks from the campus. By the time I had paid tuition on 16 hours of classes, building use fees, and several more such trumped up charges, bought books and a slide rule, my savings were almost gone so I found a night job at Paul's Highland Avenue Grocery to support myself for the rest of the school year. The following summer I went to work for the Texas Highway Engineers office in Liberty, for A.B.Middleton as a draftsman along with Elray Estes, Floyd Peace, Jimmy Belcher, Bob White, and Ted Ziller. I bought a 1954 Plymouth 2 dor hardtop with sky blue body and black roof and went back to college in the fall of 1960. I met a beautiful young red headed girl named Wanda Sue Parker with whom I was immediately stricken and wanted her for my life's mate. However she was just starting her senior year of high school in Daisetta, Texas and I still needed 3 more years of college so we dated on weekends when I came home for my weekend job as I was then living in the college dorm at Lamar. After I finished my second college year, I took another summer job with the highway engineers office in Silsbee, Texas as a junior inspector on the Neches River bridge construction near Evadale, Texas. Wanda graduated from Hull-Daisetta High School and we could not wait any longer so I found an apartment right across the highway from my office and then on Saturday, May 27, 1961, we got married in my parents home by a Baptist minister and drove to Galveston Island for a weekend honeymoon. At the end of that summer we moved to Liberty where I took a job with Buchanan Auto Supply and then took a job in January of 1962 with Mearns Chevrolet parts department until the summer of 1964 when we moved to Houston and went to work for Sam White Oldsmobile parts department on south Main St. Then in 1965 went to Sam Montgomery Oldsmobile on Kirby Dr. We moved from Ralfallen St to 5715 Community Dr in West University Place. In 1969 we moved out of Houston to the Hidden Valley subdivision just about ten miles out north of Houston off Hwy I-35 to get our kids out of the stinking big city and the bad schools. We then decided to take our family back to country living like we grew up and moved to the sweet piney woods of Jasper, Texas where I worked as the parts sales manager for Joe Bruce Kinnear at Kinnear Motors from 1971 thru 1981 and we bought our first home about ten miles north of Jasper and about 6 miles east of Sam Rayburn Reservoir dam on highway 255. It was a great place to raise our kids, between the Angelina and Sabine National Forests and I became a scoutmaster for the ten years and Wanda became a Cub Scout denmother, a Brownie leader, and then a Girl Scout troop leader and we worshipped with the Brookeland Church of Christ just 6 miles up hwy 96 north of us where I taught the Sunday morning adult bible class. Our children, Roy and Jan both graduated from Jasper High School in 1981 and there was no college close by and we couldn't afford to pay college room, board, tuition, and books for the two of them away from home so I found another job in Tyler, Texas with Barrett Motor Co and Wanda took a seamstress job with Jurrell Enterprises working for R.L.Davis so the kids could live at home and attend Tyler Junior College. We moved to the west side of Lake Palestine into Flat Creek Cove subdivision twenty miles from Tyler and rented James Lee's lakeside trailer house. After the two older children had gone two years to Tyler Junior College, and neither would go on to the University Of Texas at Tyler, then James Edward, our younger son started classes at TJC while still in his senior year of high school at Brownsboro. Wanda developed carpal tunnel syndrome in her left hand and after one operation was unable to do seamstress work any longer so the state of Texas paid for two years of training at Tyler Junior College to become a preschool teacher. She then taught at Shiloh Road Christian Academy for 7 years. In January of 1990 we bought another home 12 miles south of Tyler in Pine Trail Shores lakeside subdivision on Lake Palestine and sold our home at Jasper. In July of 1995 I took a job as the parts sales manager with Ed Bozarth Chevrolet in Grand Junction, Colorado and he turned out to be the best employer I ever had and ran the best managed business I ever worked with. Living in Colorado was wonderful what with all the open bureau of land management and large national forests to hunt, fish, camp, hike, and mountain climb and go skiing in the mountains in winter. The Western Slope Council of Boy Scouts found that I had ten years experience as a scoutmaster and they gently twisted my arm for two more years service, but I enjoyed teaching my scouts to cross country ski while also teaching wilderness survival skills along with all the usual scouting skills of first aid, firebuilding, cooking, leadership, and citizenship. We also bought a camper trailer and an ATV fourwheeler to ride off-road thru the mountains. But after I had 5 heart bypasses in 1999 and Wanda came down with Parkinson's disease in 2004, we then decided to go ahead and retire in December 2007 before we got too disabled to travel and enjoy some of our retirement years. We then moved back into our home here in Texas in January 2008 and packed up our camper trailer and the ATV 4wheeler trailer and on May 15th left on a lifetime dream vacation pulling both trailers up thru Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, British Columbia, Alberta, and Yukon territory, into Tok, Alaska then Northpole, Fairbanks, Denali National Park on Mt. Mckinley, Talkeetna, Wasilla, Anchorage, Soldotna and Homer. We saw black bears, big brown grizzly bears, buffalo, mountain sheep, reindeer, moose but no deer or elk in Alaska or the Canadian Yukon. We saw deer and elk as far north as British Columbia but none past there. We spent three weeks there touring Alaska and fishing the Kenai and Russian rivers while camped in the Western RV campgrounds in Soldotna. We went to worship with the Soldotna Church of Christ two sundays and the church in Homer once while there. I also hired a fishing guide with Alaskan Bitefinders to take me on the Kenai River for King salmon but we fished from six am till two pm without a bite and he insisted I should use his rod and baits while we slow trolled the deeper holes in the river bottom where he said the salmon hung out to escape the very strong river current. I counted sixteen other boats fishing in sight of us and no one was seen catching anything so we were apparently too late as the fish had already migrated upstream. Alaskan Bitefinders phone number is 907-223-8704 and he did try agressively to find fish in many different places that were known by him to be productive and he earned his money by his efforts as we did not just sit and spend our time in one place. Prices there were outrageous for everything. Gas was six dollars per gallon, eggs were three dollars a dozen, bread was four dollars a loaf as hardly anything is grown or raised there and is all shipped in from the lower forty-eight states so that freight costs are a large part of the exhorbitant prices. After about three weeks there we headed back south homeward by a different route than the Alcan Hwy we came up on so we took the Cassiar Hwy which was mostly gravel road down thru the western side of British Columbia thru some large indian reservations and whenever we stopped to eat or buy gas they were very open and friendly people. We saw a lot more big game animals on this highway including bighorn sheep, bears, moose, reindeer, whitetail deer, and ducks, geese, loons and Eagles. We came down thru Idaho and stopped off by Coeur d'Alene to visit some friends that we had known from Grand Junction, Colorado and then on into Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, and back into the Texas panhandle and hwy 287 toward home. We arrived back on July 4th holiday after seven weeks of pulling two trailers about 12,000 miles and we were both pretty well worn out. But it had been everything we had dreamed of for all our life together. We have many pictures and memories to cherish including seeing our friends in Grand Junction again. We have since then celebrated our golden 50th wedding aniversary in 2011 and Wanda's health has improved since being treated by the national authority on Parkinson's Dr. George Plotkin and he is right here in Tyler. Wanda passed away on January 7, 2021 and our oldest son did in February, the next month. Thank you Lord for 60 years with them.

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