Subtle Brain Injury

by his son

Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.

Gordon S. Johnson, Sr., was a hard man to know.  While he could lead an industry, lead a congregation, lead a family of 9, he was a man who kept much of his thoughts to himself, or shared them only with the someone far closer to him than I, even though I tried for many years to learn more about what made him tick, to get him to leave a further legacy of his wisdom.  Unlike our mother who entertained us for hours with stories of her youth, her adolescence, her years in college, the only memorable stories from my father were of my mother and a few of his father, Basil Johnson, who I did not know nearly well enough.   I write this as a record of the man who has occupied my thoughts more than I might have guessed in this period of his illness and also in the hopes that the others who knew him will fill in some of the details of this too narrow of perspective on the life he lived.

Thus, as I write this about my father my greatest insight into him is in my own reflection. I am Gordon S. Johnson, Jr., his name sake, a person who is far more motivated to communicate his ideas to the outside world.   In reflecting on my own life, I see the impact he made upon me.  In a decade when I am rediscovering the value of writing human stories, I find that it is not the story of my father’s life that I can tell, but the way in which his mentoring molded me, perhaps his most curious of students.
I am a man of many questions – hard questions, multiple questions, which may begin simple but evolve into probes and challenges that have often frustrated my industries greatest minds.  While I remember my childhood from the time of Vince Lombardi in exquisite detail, I do not remember a question my father could not answer until I was perhaps 12 – and a question he dodged until I was much older.  He was a possessor of great knowledge about all things a boy would ask his father, including World War II, The Great Depression, religion, peace and sports.

Sports was terribly important to me then and remains so now.  I think it may have been equally important to him, which in retrospect may explain why a man who had no athletic success as a young man, won national championships for nearly 20 years after he was 60.  One distinct memory of my early childhood was his delight when the new to us (but well used) family’s first television was turned on and we could watch the Packers.  I could be wrong on the year, but it would likely have been 1960, the second year Vince Lombardi coached the Packers.  You can imagine the number of questions a boy like me could have asked about sports.  He answered all of those questions and provided me with a knowledge base that has no other source.  For example – the Minnesota Twins started as the Washington Senators.  I don’t know that because I read it in a book, but because my father told me that.

My father molded me so much because of his choice to move from the Village of Kohler to rural Sheboygan in 1952 (the year before I was born) where we had five acres of our own property.   I don’t have strong recollections of playing ball with my dad, but with our whole family.  On Washington Avenue, we had our own ball diamond, with its own home run fence.  (It might have been at my insistence that hitting it over the fence stopped being an out, but my sister Judy would know more.)  Also with our home and its boy-friendly environment came the love for bonfires, for the woods, for homemade ice cream and in a different way, for flowers.  While I owe my mother for the secret of indiscriminately giving roses, it was my father and his gardens that provided the source for those flowers.

My father never pushed me to do anything, just provided me with the support and the passive guidance to do well those things I undertook.  Not all of them were successes.  (No, he didn’t teach me to build fires in straw.)  I still remember the soap-box derby car, that I procrastinated on way too long and crashed, not out of poor design, but inexperienced driving. That project also carries with it the remembrance of his disappointment that I did not attacked things with the disciplined work ethic he or my older brother Lowell, would have done.  Yet in working together, I hope that he also discovered that those differences from my older, more disciplined siblings, defined who I was.
When my father did not agree with a path you were on, he did not harp on it, did not forbid the conduct.  While he might have been different with the older kids, by the time I came along as child number six, either the strength of my will or his philosophy of parenting had changed to the point that discipline came only from quietly stated guidance.  The only exceptions were too aggressive arguments with my mother or that odd rule about riding a bicycle before nine.  You got a bicycle for your ninth birthday in our family and were not to ride one before.  It says something about his flexibility that the “bike rule” got relaxed the summer I was eight and a half.

When that little unfortunate thing happened with the matches in the hayloft, he did not punish me unnecessarily, believing that the arrival of the fire trucks and the truth telling to the fire chief had left a valuable lesson.  Perhaps he understood that my theory that a fire could be smothered by hay was scientifically valid, if a bit flawed in the engineering.
There are three unshakeable memories of family that I carry forward:  the bonfires (we called them “wiener roasts”), the slideshows and the dinner table.

Bonfires. Despite my brush with the law, my love for a wood fire was permanently ingrained by those family get-togethers.  The earliest ones were in our glorious backyard, often burning up the remnants of the grand willow tree that kept falling apart and regenerating.  For wiener sticks, he would venture into the apple orchid and cut a “switch.”  I learned the “art” of roasting a hot dog and a marshmallow before I was allowed to ride a bicycle.

Slideshows. My interest in photography is a good example of his passive guidance.   Somewhere about the time I was old enough to remember, Dad started taking color slides, instead of black and white photographs.  Thus began one of the most memorable things our family did together, sitting in the dark of our living room and watching slideshows and family movies.  I think I might still have that movie screen – not sure quite where it is – but I can picture it clearly, almost feel the texture of its reflective surface, describe in detail its working parts.  He never pushed me to become a photographer, just lead by example.  He never went out and bought me an expensive camera, but when I independently got interested in photography in high school, he not only allowed me access to his cameras, but I had his portfolio as an inspiration.  He never claimed any special talent or knowledge about photography, but the body of work of our family pictures is quite impressive.  All of these pictures were taken with range-finder cameras, a technology for focusing few remember.

My Favorite Photograph Taken by My Father – My Sister Carol

Family Dialogue. The key focus of our family was the dinner table.  Dad ate two meals a day with us, every day.  He would drive home from Kohler at lunch and join us.  If the reader knows any of my father’s children, you can picture the dynamics of 6-8 people sitting at a round oak table, at every meal.  We all like to eat, so the meal would start out quiet.  But as the food disappeared, conversation would begin.  I don’t remember either Dad or Mom as much of a moderator.  They say that law school will teach you how to think.  I didn’t learn to think there. I learned to think at that dinner table.   My father’s capacity to know the answer, encouraged the countless questions. From the competition for ideas with my outspoken siblings, came the desire to persuade, to marshal the facts.

Gordon S. Johnson, Sr. (far right) with most of his descendants on his 90th birthday.

By many, my father is remembered as the great master’s runner, the man Dundee built the billboard to commemorate, the man who won his age group in the 10K in the National Senior Olympics at age 80, by nine minutes.  But my father’s greatest achievements were not with his legs.  My father was a leading engineer whose scientific brilliance was dedicated to energy efficiency. His career was not focused on global warming, but to the confined tasks of making Kohler generators better.    He was President of his national trade association before becoming executive director.  He served in that capacity for more than 15 years after retiring from the Kohler Company.   Not until my mother got sick when he was already 82, did he stop quietly guiding that industry.

Though he worked in a narrow part of the energy sphere, he was still a man with broad vision.  Had he been tasked with the more global issue of climate change, he would have made a profound difference. I know this because he was my mentor in 1971, when as a senior in high school, I set off to solve all of the world’s energy problems in a high school term paper.  This decade is not the first time American’s have worried about our energy consumption.  We had our Earth Day and the early 70′s were the beginnings of the “environment movement.”  This was nothing new to him.  What was new was that politics had gotten his “hippy” son to have an insatiable appetite to learn and advocate about.

My “father – the resource” was there in my time of intense curiosity about energy and the environment.  Through osmosis I must have learned a few things about energy before that fall, but with his direction, I advocated an energy policy, that at its core, made those who drove pay for the privilege and rewarded those who did not.  Cars had to be more efficient, gas had to be more expensive and mass transit needed to be free.  A tax would be put on gasoline – $.50 at a time gasoline was $.29.  My recollection of working with my father on that project was that he was not just amused by my ideals – that he actually got a progressive enthusiasm for it.  While back then writers of ideas did not have access to the world in the same way the internet allows us today, somehow I really believed that if I could think this all out, the world would be a better place.

I do not have a copy of the 50 page paper.  My English teacher admitted to not even having read it before giving me an A.   Yet, that my voice was not heard by anyone but my father did not matter.  Working together, we had “solved the world’s problems.”  To the degree that he would quietly have had a preference of someone else’s career path, I think he would have hoped I became a scientist. He would have known following in his career path as a corporate engineer would not have suited me.  He knew that my gift of creativity rather than discipline, would not have flourished in a world such as the Kohler Company.  But life’s paths are chosen by many random things.  His lack of a strong hand when I got mad at a teacher and gave up math before trigonometry, permanently foreclosed a scientific future.  Frankly, I can’t blame  him for that because I am sure I never even discussed dropping math with him – just did it.

He was very pleased when I set off to become a writer and made additional financial sacrifices to allow me to go Northwestern University’s Journalism school.  I think he quietly enjoyed reading my stories. The one time I know he did was when he praised me for the story “An Obituary for a Library”, written about the closing of the neighborhood library.

I graduated from Journalism school in 1975, a time almost as bad for reporters as the current day, so that field did not become my career path.   I have always suspected that he wasn’t all that thrilled when I chose law.  He never liked lawyers much and what little respect he had for them was soured by one of my siblings divorce.  Yet, he encouraged me when I chose law school over unemployment.  I think he recognized that it was a field where I had natural talent.

When 15 years after I graduated from law school my career turned to the unusual path of brain injury attorney, those scientific instincts he had honed in me and the ability to express an opinion through the written word, became invaluable.  My greatest professional accomplishments have been as an author and as a neuroscientist.  I do not have a Ph.D. or any formal scientific training. While not many other lawyers would dare claim to be a neuroscientist, it is a term I believe aptly applies to me based upon the classic definition of “scientist.”  I have studied brain injury; I have reported on brain injury; I have analyzed and published that analysis, defended it effectively against rigid criticism and guided other minds in new directions.

My father was a man of science, a man of knowledge, a man devoted to his family and one open to new ideas.   What I have achieved in my life I owe to the environment in which I was raised and the other gifts he and my mother gave me.