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Today's Featured Biography

 
Joseph Johnston

Joseph Hague Johnston Jr.
The early years
The first place I lived was 313 S. 7th Street. Some notables in the neighborhood.. The Hammels, Weisbach’s, Caruthers. Rich Little lived over on eight Street. Ron Haley was a friend I played with a lot as a little boy. He was in a different grade and we didn’t stay close after we moved out of the neighborhood.

Bobby Nichols lived a few block’s away and we got into much mischief. I remember building parachutes with kitchen towels and rope and string , using these to jump off the garage was not succesfull. I recall some injuries and a ban on all future garage jumping. How we survived is unknown to me.
One day a group of kids were out on the sidewalk in front of our house popping 22 shells with a hammer. The shells and hammer came from our house, but that couldn’t have been me hitting those shells.
Some time during this period ( we stayed there till about 3rd grade I think) I got the name of “ONE TRIP”. I hated carrying wood into the house so used to load up until it was over my head to save trips.

I remember getting up on winter mornings and shaking down the coal stove in the living room adding wood to perk up the fire and coal to bank it.
Lots of memories are coming but I have to break for bed,
eb 4 2008- finally put this stuff in.
Ducks and mushrooms: When my parents were still together we would have a group of their friends over. After a few days rain the guys would gather mushroom in the river bottom and then go duck hunting. I recall Mom and other ladies cooking big ovens full of ducks and making mushroom and gravy. Ill bet most of you have the same kinds of memories. We lived a much simpler life in those days. But I think a richer lif in personal relationships

Kick the can. We used to play kick the can in the neighborhood on summer evenings. I recall being it for along time as I was one of the youngest. These times are precious to me. I feel sorry for the kids of today. All they have is organized sports and recreation.
Keds: In the spring we would get a new pair of Keds tennis shoes. I recall leaping and running , stopping and turning swiftly with these new shoes. The felt so light after a winter of big shoes, overshoes and the like. Of course at the end of summer they were in shreds but what a memory.
Barefoot in overalls: In the summer most all we wore was bib overalls and went barefoot. The test with other boys was to see how you could turn and run barefoot.

The fire: We lived in a little house on 7th street, the house had a vacant lot next to it. My Dad burned the weeds on that lot, then left to go downtown for some drinks. We woke up to smoke called the fire department. Some sparks had gotten into the sawdust banking the house against the winter cold. It is a lonely and scary feeling to watch your house burning from the neighbors house.

Grade School:
I started school at the Jefferson school in Hamilton. My first teacher was Mrs. Molly Ryan. She also taught my Dad, Uncle Bob, and Aunt Mildred. That kind of continuity is seldom seen today. I remember her as a warm and nice woman. We had an epileptic boy in our class, Robert Pellant; we were introduced to some of the sadness in life. I don’t think I appreciated until later how tough it was on Blackie. He died while in his late teens.

I was in love with Jane Earl Cox in the first grade. Don’t ask me how I remember that name. I remember spending much time picking out her Valentine and as I recall she didn’t even give me one. In those days there was none if this democratic everyone gets a card thing. The new way is better I was heartbroken.

I can’t recall too much about this time period. My Mom and dad separated for about 8 month’s during this time period and dad would come to the house drunk at about three in the morning and pound on the door. They divorced for good in 1943. It is kind of tough on a young kid to think he has to be the man of the house.

I recall Pearl Harbor Day and being scared. Everyone was listening to the radio and talking angrily about how the Japs didn’t have a chance. I remember all the kids talking about it in the schoolyard the next day. My Dad enlisted in the Air Force immediately. I think he thought it might save the marriage.

The problem was alcohol. He once went to court because he was behind on child support payments. He traded all visitations for a cash payment to my mom and no more child support. This was a poor choice. It forever made me mistrustful of his motives and love. Many years later when his second wife Grace died, he was looking for sympathy from me about his finances, I said I guess you’ll have to sell your car and use the bus. What goes around comes around.

We learned to write script in the third grade. I never would learn The Palmer method I decided it was too slow. To this day that decision affects my life. I can’t write legibly but I sure can write fast.

During the war mom and another woman ran the café that was previously owned by a Japanese family. I don’t know what happened but I think the locals ran them out of town. She worked long hours all the time. I went to the Washington school for the 4th grade during this time period. I worked around the restaurant at small chore’s. I recall one instance when a forest fire crew needed lunches. I stood at a counter in the kitchen and made up 200 hundred lunches with cheese sandwiches and an apple. Maybe more stuff was in their but I can’t recall all the details. The Model Cafe had a small fountain I got to make my own soda’s so naturally I mixed all the flavors and did stupid things like that.

At the Washington I met Freddie Stout who has been a lifelong friend. His Aunt Helen Stout was the teacher. I remember we had inkwells for penmanship. I sat behind Mary Lu Marick and I always wanted to put her braid in an inkwell but never did. We later dated in high school.

12/05/2001 I was listening to some old New Orleans sounds from the Dish yesterday as I was working around the house and some memories came flooding in. About 6th or 7th grade Mom went to Missoula to go to beauty operators school. She and Janyce lived there for a few months and then she came back and apprenticed in a local beauty shop. This time was one of the loneliest times in my life. It was the first time I had been separated from my family and I was very young.

I had a little record player for 78-RPM records. It didn’t even have an amplifier just a kind of boom box hooked to the needle arm which made it hearable. I had a copy of TD’s Boogie that was a marvelous big band record and very popular at the time. I also had acquired an album of Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. This was a set of classic New Orleans Jazz recordings that is still in most anthologies.

I also had most of the Spike Jones recordings and new all the words. I can still remember some of them.
My Aunt Mildred and Uncle Lloyd were very nice people but kind of cold. I kept to my room in the basement a lot and listened for hours to these records. TD’s Boogie is a slow Boogie with a mournful sound and this suited my mood at the time.

I joined Mom and Jan for the summer (I Think this was at the end of sixth grade) when school was out. We lived in a little basement apartment on East Pine in Missoula MT. A neighbor by the name of Bill Carr and I played catch most of the summer and roamed the Clark Fork River Bottoms. Went swimming in the swimming hole also known as the Municipal Pool. (Missoula was a big town of about 12,000 people then, which seemed huge to me coming from Hamilton as I did). A municipal swimming hole was unheard of. We small town kids swam in creeks and the rivers. Our swimming hole was at the site of a lumber mill dam which had burnt down. We built diving boards from scrounged lumber and general y had a great time there. This was known as the point. In today’s Hamilton a bridge crosses to the Bitterroot river just North of the Point.
When I was younger I would follow the older kids down to the swimming hole, which was against the rules. I never could figure out how my Mom new I had been swimming. Guess the sun burnt face gave me away. of course we were admonished to never swim naked. Imagine the chagrin of the family if we drowned and were found naked.
In later years this turned out to be a great necking place. Other adventures here will not be dwelt on.
High School
In about the spring of 1946, when the rivers and creeks were high with the spring runoff, a few of us had a great adventure. Emil La Chambre, Bill Feist, myself, and John Gerike, were tramping the river bottoms. We crossed third Creek, which this particular spring carried about as much water as the main channel of the Bitterroot River. We carried our clothes and put them back on when we reached the other side. The return was not so easy. We found a log and tried to push it across with our clothes. We were unable to make it back so we decided to float the log down Third Creek. Things were going fine till we reached the point where Third Creek and the river met. The current was so strong it created a fairly large whirlpool. When we got stuck in the whirlpool it spun the log around about three times. The end I was on was the one under water, quite an experience. Emil was on the end, which was held about three feet out of the water. Later we decided it was a good thing Bill did not go as he was not a very good swimmer and might have let go. As the summer progressed we built a great diving board in the bowl created by the whirlpool. We would swim across the swimming hole and let the water pull us under and then pop us up about 15 or 20 feet away.

That fall we started High School. I must digress for a moment and speak of Charles D. Haynes the Superintendent of Schools and the principal of the Hamilton High School. C.D., as we called him, was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, who for some reason chose to live in Hamilton, He taught until retirement. C.D. was a brilliant man who maintained discipline with an iron mind. He could make you feel disappointed in yourself when you did some of the stupid things that kids do. Most of all he molded a kind of responsibility for your own actions. I can’t speak for every one but it kept me somewhat together during my crazy years.

About three years later Bill Lyman, Bill DeZell, Kenny Heintz and I were breaking the ice to claim first to swim the river bragging rights. DeZell had been in the Army and we didn’t know he was not a strong swimmer. Three of us got across easily but Bill D. was having a tough time of it. Lyman and I were just getting ready to try to drag him in when he caught an eddy, which brought him close to shore. This was a good thing because a pretty nasty rapid was only about 300 yards down stream. The water was so cold that day we couldn’t stand in it for long. We swam part way to a sand bar and had to build piles of rocks to stand on while we planned how we would make the crossing.

I carried 5 subjects all through school, which as it turned out was a good thing. I missed the first semester of my senior year and needed the credits to graduate.
I will talk about incidents involved with the sports I played. I was a decent but not a really great athlete. I thank the Lord I went to a small school and got to play varsity sports. Boy did we think we were hot stuff. Our class had some great athletes some of whom went on and played college sports. Lloyd Clark in particular was a track athlete at Bozeman. To this day he competes in age group sports. Lloyd coached basketball and track and taught school. He retired from the Hamilton school system.

One of the interesting things was the necessity of keeping my two friends Gene Platt and Richard Little eligible. Lloyd Clark, Fred Stout, Gene and Richard and I would get together and study for the six-week tests. I kept my grades pretty good without doing any other studying. This would hurt me later when I tried college because I didn’t really know how to dig in and study. Richard is a very bright guy with an amazing facility at arithmetic. He just wouldn’t do anything but goof around in school. Gene was not a good reader so had trouble in school.

Freshman football was a nightmare. I was 5’3” and weighed about 110 pounds when the year started. The coach had great expectations for me because of some hyping by the graduating seniors from our neighborhood. About the second week of practice the coach said, “ Johnston go down and catch some punts”. I thought Wow! The coach knows my name. I went down to field some punts and couldn’t help but notice all the linemen getting ready to come after me two at a time. They pounded me for about a 1/2 hour (seemed like more). My pants were too big and we had the old style uniforms with the rib guards in the pants. My rib guards were down about my waist and the thigh guards at my knees. I came close to quitting but toughed it out. I think this was my test.

The next year I started at defensive corner back and was second string quarterback. That freshman year we met the kids from the Grantsdale School. Mel Drake started as defensive tackle as a freshman. He was really fast and strong. Mel is a great guy who flew in the Air Force and was a flight engineer with one of the airlines till retirement. He is a Mormon and has just returned from his missionary trip overseas. Saw him at the 50th reunion.

Another classmate, Bert Wells, came to the 50th reunion and this was the first time any of us had seen him since High School. After the last reunion event, dinner at the Banque, we all broke up and most of us headed out of town. We heard the next day or so that Bert died of a heart attack in his motel room that Saturday night. His sister from Helena came to the reunion with him so his family was able to take care of things reasonably well. Bert’s family was from Maine, he went back and joined the Air Force there after high school graduation. He spent 20 years in the Air Force and was a small town Cop for the rest of his working years. It was a sad ending to a great reunion.

Our class has stayed fairly close as friends after high school. We have had reunions every five years so we have watched each other grow old. I bless the people who started this tradition of a reunion every five years. I treasure the time we have spent together as ere grow older.

Notes: the beer warehouse
The state tournament
Gene’s early death
The Navy Years
Pre Barbie Years

I will add more over the next couple of month's
The Barbie and Joe year of fun before we married

Joseph Hague Johnston & Barbara Anne Bell Johnston

A lot of stuff happened to me before I married Barbie but I think in looking back this was the most important event of my life. It produced our two wonderful kids and a lifetime of memories. Most of which of course, were just everyday life but our lives are not made up of monumental events. We just get up in the morning and proceed with the day. I can’t imagine the bleakness of what my life would have been without Barb and the kids. As I sit here trying to contemplate all this I am flooded with instances, most of which seem too trivial to write down. Maybe it’s all in my mind and each ordinary life is made up the same way. I wish I were more articulate or had paid more attention to what was going on.
We first met when Barb was an elevator operator at Fredrick & Nelson, a major department store in Seattle at the time. It is now defunct. My cousin Sharon knew her and introduced us. I notice how beautiful she was but didn’t pursue any relationship. I would see her around Madison Park, the neighborhood where I lived, with a guy named Dick Lehman and occasionally with some other cats.
The turning point was when Sharon And Barb got laid off at Fredrick’s and had a few drinks before catching the bus to Madison Park. I was warming up a stool at the Attic Tavern when they came boiling in the door three sheets to the wind. Always the gentleman I bought them a few beers and took them home (my cousin first). Well, one thing led to another and Barb and I necked for a while and made a tentative date for some future time. She was the best kisser I had ever met (with the possible exception of Mary Lu Marik, but high school is a long time to remember) . She still is and is much better after forty years of practice.
We dated sporadically for a while then I kept the pressure on and dated her every chance I got. She had a lot of guys chasing her so keeping them at bay was not an easy task. I new we were meant for each other, long before she did. Being six years older, I had kissed a few more frogs than she had and hadn’t found my princess yet. Barbie was the one. Undoubtedly she was the most beautiful woman I had ever known. To this day I am as attracted to her as I was then. I worked second shift on a rotating basis and boy did I get tired trying to date her, work, as well as get a little sleep now and then.
One time one of the guys from around Madison Park was having a dinner party and had invited Barbie. I knew this was a crucial time in our young romance, so I took the night off and her out to dinner at one of the best restaurants in town. I am not sure but I think we reached an agreement about this time to date just each other.
During the next year we roamed the town on dates and parties with other couples and the group of skiers from the local tavern. The famous Red Onion was the meeting place for the young people of Madison Park. We found the clubs, such as Pete’s Poopdeck where jazz was played and with peanut shells on the floor it was great. We saw artists like Cal Tjader, Mongo Santa Maria. Went to movies every Sunday Night. Typically we would close some place and have Steak, eggs and pancakes at a little restaurant on 8th and Union.
Another great spot was Tai Tung Cafe I China town. Some of the greatest Chinese food in the area. Many times a gang would leave The Red Onion and head for Tai Tung for a late dinner.
One Night we were skiing. I had put a couple of beers in my pocket earlier. Barb and I were laying in the snow with our skis stuck in the snow necking a little and having a brew when Barb’s younger sister came up to the top of the lift with her friends. She came over to say hello. Annie was blushing and a bit embarrassed. It probably should have been us.
We discovered Gabes on Sixth Avenue. Gabe had the best sound system in town. The jukebox was loaded with his own personal collection of jazz and R&B. This was my introduction to the blues. It has been a lifetime love for this raw and gutsy music. A friend from Madison Park, Jay Smith, Barb and I would go down to Gabes occasionly and open it up at 6 o’clock Saturday morning. The man who cleaned the place and tended bar till about 4 in the afternoon was a really knowledgeable man. He new blues and jazz better than most people I had ever met. We would play through the jukebox based on his advice and had marvelous times soaking up the music.
I hope to get my record collection on CD’s so the grandkids can listen to it some day.
I proposed one night when we were becalmed on Lake Washington on a friend’s sailboat. Barb refused me then saying she loved me but was still too young to get married. At my advanced age of twenty-seven I was ready to take the step. I did not give up but made plans to go to Alaska and work on the DEW line. (The DEW LINE was an advanced warning radar system against a Russian attack). She has always accused me of threatening this as a ruse. I think the thing that tipped her in my favor was a Christmas time trip to Broderick, CA where she met my mom and her second husband Tim Maraglia. They took her in their arms and loved her so much she couldn’t continue to turn me down. After that trip we planned on eloping the following spring. This turned out differently as I will relate later.
1/4/2002 10:37 PM
The night before we were to leave on our vacation, we decided to tell Barb’s folks about the pending marriage. They immediately sprung into action arranged a small wedding at the Church of the Epiphany in Madrona. They also reached the Tennis Club and arranged a champagne brunch after the ceremony. It was all quite moving that they would take care of this so quickly. We really saved Ralph and Anne quite a bit of money so it all worked out. Ralph slipped me $150 for our honeymoon which helped a lot. Dick Stotler and his wife Barbara stood up for us. Sharon Johnston was there as well as my sister Jan. We really screwed up and didn’t invite Barb’s roommate Judy. This caused a lot of hurt feelings and we realized later we should have done this.


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