Staff Sergeant William H. Johnson Photo © Kathleen A. Johnson |
In 1949 William married
librarian Dolores Westphal, and they had two daughters.
Word got around his neighborhood that he knew everything
about radios and TVs, and he was soon kept busy repairing
everyone's.
For forty years he
worked for the American Can Company, and for thirty he was
Financial Secretary of his local International Association
of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. When he retired
from that position, he threw in two cents of his own to
round the balance up to the nearest dollar.
He served all his adult
life as verger and usher at his church.
He belonged to the Gamma Kappa Delta club and
choir, where he sang and acted in Gilbert & Sullivan
plays and read poetry.
As a member of Men's Club, he prepared pancakes for
church breakfasts on Sundays. He laid new
tiles in the Sunday school and painted the walls. When a young boy
in the congregation came down with a paralyzing fever,
William became a "Patterning" volunteer, spending
countless hours training the boy's body to move again.
For decades Soldier
Field rang with his fervent cheers for the Chicago Bears. He loved
reading, walking, museums, travel, PBS science programs,
the space program, and music.
Before the war, William sang lead in the barbershop
quintet "The Five Shades of Blue." He also played
harmonica and enjoyed listening to a variety of music
including opera, Beethoven, and ABBA.
He was an excellent swimmer, and when he was 14, he saved
the life of a 10-year-old girl who was drowning in a lake.
He's surely one of the few people in the modern era to
actually have read the book Les Miserables and all
eleven volumes of Will Durant's The Story of
Civilization. Depending
on which day you asked, his favorite poem was either
"Ozymandius" or "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" or Oscar
Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." He had a keen
sense of humor and enjoyed social satires such as Monty
Python or Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Every Saturday
night for decades, William and Dolores had a standing
date with each other at their favorite restaurant.
They traveled to England and Scotland five times, and
took a ship across the English Channel to France to
see where William had landed on D-Day. On board he
told Dolores he thought he'd never see Normandy Beach
again.
In the late 1990s, they
moved to Massachusetts to be closer to family. William passed
away in 2005, at home, with Dolores by his side.
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Cizewski,
Lovetere, Musbach, & Robinson Family
History All material not in the public domain © 2013 Leonard H. Cizewski & Kathleen A. Johnson Last Updated: Posted: December 10, 2013 Last Reviewed: |
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