Louie Johnson

Ancestors

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Louie Johnson [send private message], Bonnie Gocze [send private message], and Tom Gocze [send private message]

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Louie enjoyed a happy childhood and did well in school in his early years. I was passionate about baseball and enjoyed football with my neighborhood chums. The neighborhood was blue-collar suburban, most of the families being Polish or German and 90% Catholic. It was a good environment with lots of kids. From the age of 5 until about 8, my older neighbor, Alfie Johnson (no relation) watched out for me and introduced me to his crowd of greaser buddies. When they reached the upper part of their teens, I gravitated toward the younger kids in the neighborhood and left the greasers behind. The wide assortment of personalities in that neighborhood was good training for future interaction with all sorts of people. My best friend in those years was Ken Misiak, who was more inclined toward the sciences than athletics, and we spent lots of time building contraptions and playing with tape recorders and radios. My love of radio became the dominant pre-occupation throughout my life.

When I entered Junior High School in 1962, my world changed. I was being placed in advanced classes for "gifted" students. I wasn't especially gifted. I had breezed through elementary school with little effort, but I could not compete with the truly gifted. That erroneous placement landed me in advanced classes all the way through high school, and I was always near the bottom of the class. This did nothing for my self-esteem. I was a voracious reader for the first half of my life, and took many life lessons from what I read. I recall being introduced to Walt Whitman in the eighth grade. I wasn't, and still am not, a fan of poetry, but something Whitman wrote stuck with me throughout my adult life - he advised me to hang out with "powerful, uneducated persons". I have found that advice to be very rewarding, as, more often than not, seemingly crude rough-hewn people can teach more about life than people in suits. I also had discovered the wonders of radio and listened nightly to voices from far away places. The singlemost influential voice in my life was that of Jean Shepherd, the great soliloquist, who, six nights a week, taught me about what to expect in situations I would likely find myself.

I wanted to be a novelist, but though I'm an excellent writer, I'm also a lousy story-teller. I stayed in school until it became vividly clear that no one was going to teach me how to write. I took jobs just to survive, and spent most of my time letting my imagination run wild.

My first decent job with a decent company was with Suburban Cablevision. The cable TV industry was in its infancy in 1976, and I saw amazing growth. When I started with the company we had 4,000 subscribers in 4 towns. When I left six years later, we had 500,000 subscribers in 51 towns. Even in that company, though, I wasn't happy until I became a draftsman in the engineering design department, based solely on my enjoyment of drafting in high school. I loved the work, became very good at it, and continued in it throughout the rest of my years in New Jersey. In 1985 I was offered a job with my brother-in-law's solar energy company in Bangor, Maine, and moved up to take the job. Now considering myself a draftsman, I felt capable of all kinds of drafting work, and was surprised when I failed to understand carpentry while working for a log home kit company. Then I moved on to a land surveying company, and enjoyed it a lot. But in 1989, all manual drafting ended, and I transitioned to computer drafting, working on cadastral property maps and topographic maps. After six years of enjoyable work for a very ugly company, I left. A few months after that, my brother-in-law called to say the weekend board operator at the talk radio station where he did a weekly home improvement call-in show had been fired. I took the job and started the greatest ride of my life. The station was in absolute shambles, but I was happy to be working in radio. Two weeks later management was assumed by the most driven human being I have ever met, Jerry Evans. He had just moved his family to Maine from San Diego and was managing while in the process of buying the station. I saw him rebuild a station from ashes to shining chrome. His major goal at first was to automate the station, and when the process began, it was discovered that I was the only one on staff with an adequate understanding of the software platform that would make it possible, so I got the job. It was trial by fire, and the learning curve was very, very steep. Within two years I was irreplaceable and was appointed Operations Manager - I did everything except sales and billing. 90% of all our advertisements were produced by me. In 2000, Jerry sold the station to Clear Channel, which has a history of destroying radio stations in every market they enter, and after sixteen months I left that job, too. I worked part time for a few other radio stations in the area for awhile, but wound up working at K-Mart for the summer and fall of 2003. Then an opening popped up at Maine Public Broadcasting, and I got the job, working Master Control on the TV end. It was a good place to work, and I was back in broadcasting, but the shifts were long and grueling and took a heavy toll. I decided to retire as soon as I reached 62. I've been retired for two years now, and enjoying it immensely, spending countless hours cleaning up noisy old time radio shows and researching the family genealogy.

In 2003, I joined Abundant Life Church in Bangor, Maine, and have never regreted it. I have since left them, but the training and support I received there during its glory years are as valuable as any training I've received anywhere in my life. My only regret is that I didn't dedicate my life to Christ much earlier, as it would have made life easier in many respects. For many years I had hoped to find a good woman to marry, but was always choosing the wrong ones. Eventually God made it clear to me that my purpose was to be a priest to these women who came to me for help. I was to be the proverbial "shoulder to cry on." Once I accepted that role, life became much richer. I also was never very keen on having children, and I think that's because I was treated as a small man during childhood. I think most of my life has been spent trying to release that inner child.

I should note here that the greatest influence on my life (in addition to the nightly rantings of Jean Shepherd) was my grandfather, John Woods. Here was a man as good and pure as any who ever lived. He was, by example, the greatest Christian I've ever known. From the time I was about 10 until 15, I'd spend two weeks during the summer at his home at the Jersey shore, and watched the way he interacted with other people. He was absolutely the most neighborly and caring human I've ever met, always looking to extend himself to others. In that regard, I did not live the lesson learned, but his example was one to admire and aspire toward.

Note For Future Researchers

As one who has been frustrated by not finding people (who I know were living during a specific timespan) shown in census reports of the same timespans, I would like to save you some work: I was never contacted, thus never counted, in the U.S. Census reports for 1990 and 2000. I was counted in 1980 in Westfield, New Jersey where I was sharing a house with several co-workers in the cable television industry. Our house was singled out for special analysis by the census taker, Mrs. Muskus. She visited us several times over a six month period because the makeup of our household changed frequently with people moving in and out often. I was also counted in 2010 while living in Bangor, Maine and working for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. That was a simple mail-in ballot type survey, and I did fill it out and return it. I assume my family was counted in 1950, 1960, and 1970, although I have no direct recollection of a census survey.

Birth

30 APR 1949

Overlook Hospital, Summit, NJ

Education

1954 - 1962 Connecticut Farms School, Union, New Jersey

1962 - 1964 Burnet Junior High School, Union, New Jersey

1964 - 1967 Union High School, Union, New Jersey

1967 - 1969 Union College, Cranford, New Jersey (Associate in Arts)

1969 - 1970 Bloomfield College

1971 - 1971 (one semester) Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey

Employment

1969 - summer J.L. Hammett Co. (school supply warehouse), Union, New Jersey

1971 - Bamberger's Department Store, Newark, New Jersey

1975 - 1976 - Union Automotive Co., Union, New Jersey

1976 - 1982 - Suburban Cablevision, East Orange, New Jersey:

1976 - 1978 Service Department Dispatch

1978 - 1979 Construction Department Field Survey

1979 - 1982 Engineering Services, Drafting & Design

1982 - G.T. Engineering, Toms River, New Jersey

1983 - 1985 Hillsborough Cablevision, Belle Mead, New Jersey

1985 - 1986 Maine Solartechnics, Bangor, Maine

1987 - Northern Products Log Homes, Bangor, Maine

1987 - 1989 - TSI Engineering (land survey drafting)

1989 - 1996 - James W. Sewall Company, Old Town, Maine (cadastral and topographic mapping, natural gas pipeline database management)

1996 - 2001 - WVOM - FM Radio, Bangor, Maine (operations manager)

2001 - 2003 - WGUY - FM Radio, Newport, Maine (audio board operator), WNZS Radio, Eddington, Maine

2003 - 2004 - K-Mart, Bangor, Maine

2004 - 2011 - Maine Public Broadcasting Network, Bangor, Maine (master control operator)

18 June 2011 - retired

Sources

First-hand information. Entered by Louie Johnson at registration.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Louie Johnson for creating WikiTree profile Johnson-18744 through the import of Louie Johnson Tree (5-13-2013).GED on May 13, 2013. Click to the Changes page for the details of edits by Louie and others.