1stStaff Sergeant William H. Johnson: The Rest of His LifeSignal Corps
by his daughter ©  Kathleen A. Johnson
Johnson
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.


215th Signal Depot Company >>

Signal Units in the Normandy Campaign >>

 

Unofficial Informal Archive of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Northwest Europe in WWII >>
INDEX: 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
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