 |
| Allan Johnson, 88. |
That marked the beginning of a 55-year odyssey
that included professional residences at one weekly and four daily newspapers,
that took me to all four corners of the country and back, and continues today
in another form of media that adds moving pictures to the words.
But as with many other walks of life, sometimes the most lasting and cherished memories stem from the earliest days of one’s career, and those include the people that helped guide and shape it.
Allan Johnson was one of those people for me.
Johnson, who died this week at the age of 88, was the former Attleboro Sun’s Mansfield correspondent when I first started work at the Mansfield News in 1969, following my sophomore year in high school. Like many people that worked at small newspapers, Johnson was a jack-of-all-trades, a reporter that had to be versatile enough to handle a multitude of disciplines, covering meetings of the selectmen and school committee, snapping photos of breaking news around town, even supervising delivery routes of the newspaper – and yes, occasionally covering high school sports as well.
My boss at the News, an old-school New England editor named Howard Fowler, commanded me to keep an eye on Johnson. It’s not that I would be competing with him for news gathering, but Fowler wanted to make sure that the News didn’t miss anything on the sports side if he was going to make a commitment to hire me, and the best way to ensure that was by making sure I respected the competition.
So I paid attention, and I benefitted from it.
Johnson would usually get the assignment of covering Mansfield football games on Saturday afternoons, and I would be sure to pick up the Monday edition of the Sun to see what he did. The first thing I noticed was that he kept statistics, and that those appeared at the end of the story to enhance the information contained within it.
As a 15-year-old kid that got his job more on the basis of bravado than proven ability, I had a lot to learn. I had no idea how to keep statistics. I had to learn on my own, but at least I had Johnson’s weekly stories to provide me with a blueprint.
Another thing that impressed me was how quickly Johnson had to compile the material. There was no Sunday edition of the local daily in those days, but my newspaper didn’t publish until Thursdays of every week, and I still thought the Tuesday-evening deadline for my copy was too short a time for me to get the job done. Eventually I understood that Johnson got his story and stats done in mere hours after a game, and I made it my goal to match that performance, if not to exceed it.
It took a while, but I got there.
Johnson was a very busy man with all of his responsibilities, working out of a two-room office on North Main Street that looked more like a shed than anything else (and now is just the site of a gravel parking lot), so our paths did not cross that often during my youth. But that changed a few years later.
In 1977, not long removed from Northwestern University and reporting jobs at the Westfield Evening News and Taunton Daily Gazette, I was hired by The Sun Chronicle as a news reporter – first to cover the towns of Foxboro, Wrentham and Norfolk, then to cover Norton. My sports background didn’t kick in immediately, but once it did, I had a full appreciation of the efforts that were necessary from our network of town correspondents like Johnson. I was always on the go, always trying to track down one news tip or another, always committed to covering a multitude of municipal meetings – while, at the same time, sneaking into the sports department to take some of the load off Peter Gobis.
When I became sports editor in 1980, I found that I suddenly had sway over assigning members of our news staff and correspondents to football games in the fall, so I took full advantage of it. Johnson still did the Mansfield games, Vin Igo the Foxboro games, reporters Henry Reiley and Rick Foster went wherever we needed them – even our former publisher, Paul Rixon, could be found on the sidelines (under a pseudonym) if necessary. Small newspapers are and have always been a team effort.
Eventually, the newspaper grew beyond the need to
take an all-hands-on-deck approach to weekend sports coverage. We were able to
look beyond our doors for young and budding talent, developing a core group of
part-time writers to cover local games – and more than a few of them went on to
careers in sports journalism of their own, some whose names you’d recognize
from your daily sports-news consumption.
The Sun Chronicle gradually lessened its use of part-time news correspondents, preferring to station full-time staff writers in the communities they covered. But that didn’t end Johnson’s career with us; his expertise at coordinating newspaper deliveries made him the perfect choice to become an assistant manager of the Circulation Department, rounding out his 51 years of overall service to the newspaper.
During that time, Johnson would frequently stop by the sports desk and chat about how the Hornets were doing, or he’d bring up one of his favorite topics – the expertise of Bill Belichick as a football coach, which he came to admire long before Belichick took the Patriots’ reins in 2000. Whether as the defensive coordinator of the New York Giants or as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, Belichick’s potential greatness was recognized by Johnson long before Robert Kraft came to the same conclusion.
We’d have spirited debates about Belichick’s merits over the years. One of Johnson’s happiest moments, I believe, was when he delivered the appropriate “I told you so” palaver upon my return from Cleveland following an AFC playoff loss by the Patriots to the original Browns – the game in which Belichick’s Browns bested the team coached by his former mentor in the Meadowlands, Bill Parcells.
Johnson grew up in Foxboro and graduated a Warrior, but he clearly found a welcoming professional home in rival Mansfield for much of his life. He served in the Mass. National Guard and the U.S. Air Force for a total of six years before he entered the workforce, first with Raytheon and then with the Attleboro Sun.
As a writer for the predecessor to today’s Sun Chronicle, his job included not only all of the aforementioned duties, but he also wrote a weekly opinion column that did a pretty good job of skewering the public officials of Mansfield when they deserved it. Johnson created a mythical recurring character named “Tontoe,” not-so-loosely based upon the Lone Ranger’s Native American sidekick, to voice the critiques of public policy that might sound like bias if spoken by him.
The character may have been a little politically incorrect by today’s standards, but in the 1960s, “Tontoe” got his message across while bringing a few chuckles to the reader at the same time.
As I said, it was a different time. But the demands of newspapering were a lot different in those days. Allan Johnson was an individual that gladly accepted the challenge of mastering a multitude of disciplines in order to help produce a newspaper that became a fixture in the lives of its readers. And in that, he became a worthy role model for the next generation of reporters to follow.
Mark Farinella wrote for more than 40 years for The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass. Respond to his commentaries at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.
