On September 23, 1995, Aiken, South Carolina lost a kind and gentle soul, and I lost a father. An obituary seldom does justice to a good life, but in this case it does provide a framework of dates and milestones that define when, and, in general, under what circumstances this exceptional man lived who meant so much to so many during his stay with us.
My father was born Free Mason Johnson on October 2, 1908, in Aiken, South Carolina, the third child of Cecelia Elizabeth Ladeveze and Dr. Charles C. Johnson, Sr., a physician and pharmacist in Aiken from 1904 until his death in 1928.
My father attended the public schools of Aiken, and graduated from Martha Schofield Normal and Industrial School in the class of 1928. In that same year, and on the threshold of the great Depression, his father died. In the fall of that year, he headed off to Howard University to join his older brother Charles who was already one year into his studies in that school's pharmacy program. The two, who were always inseperable companions, waited tables in Washington, D.C. restaurants and pooled their meager resources to make ends meet.
The brothers graduated together in 1932, with PhC (Pharmaceutical Chemist) degrees and made their way back home to work in the family pharmacy. Their oldest sister Mamie (Mary), who had earned her pharmacy degree earlier, and who kept the drug store running while the boys were off in school, welcomed them home.
On April 16, 1939, my father married my mother, Rosalie Nelson, of Augusta, Georgia, and brought her home to the house on the corner of Richland Avenue and Kershaw Street. It was there, in what we all affectionately called "the home house," we three children were born. I, the eldest, was born in 1941, followed by sisters Ethel Julia in 1946 and Margaret Rose in 1949. We all--my grandmother, Mama Cele (his mother, Cecelia Elizabeth Ladeveze Johnson), our immediate family and my Uncle Ladeveze, when he returned from the war--lived in that same house until my father moved my mother, sisters and me into our new home on Williamsburg Street in 1954. That was the same house, incidentally, in which my father and his sisters and brothers were also born.
Growing up as I did in such close proximity to extended family, I developed a sense of what it meant to be a Johnson early in life. From my paternal grandmother, especially, I learned that her family was respected in her birthplace of Augusta, Georgia, and it was from her that I first heard of my paternal grandfather, Dr. C. C. Johnson, whom she respected as much in death as she had in life. Whenever she referred to him, it was always as "Dr. Johnson."
Except for the period 1965 to 1975, when he worked as a pharmacist with Peoples Drug Stores in Hampton and Newport News, Virginia, my father spent his entire working life involved in the family business, Dr. C. C. Johnson's Drug Store. The pharmacy's final location, at the corner of Fairfield Street and Park Avenue, is shown at right in a 1950's photograph. His brother Charles and he operated the store during the War years, and when WWII was over, they were joined by brother Ladeveze, who had been drafted into the Army and spent the better part of four years in Europe and North Africa. I came to know these three brothers well by working with them, day in and day out, throughout my youth. From my early childhood until I left for the Navy in 1971, I was around them almost daily except for the time I spent in school. (The History of the Drugstore page contains more information on the pharmacy.)
My father loved airplanes, my mother reminds me, and he took flying lessons at the little airport in Aiken. My grandmother was so worried about his safety, however, that he stopped his lessons before his solo flight. My Aunt Cecelia Johnson McGhee remembers that my father was taken with the idea of flight very early in life. Whenever a plane came to town offering to take people for rides, she relates, he was sure to go up.
In the 50's, photography became an avid interest of his, and my father went off to take the professional photography course at Winona Falls, Indiana. At its completion, he returned to Aiken and opened a studio in a small building behind the drug store. By all accounts, he was good at it, but after a few years gave up on it as a profitable operation and concentrated once more on the pharmacy for his livelihood. He left the studio in the hands of his brother, Ladeveze Wilson Johnson, who ran it for a while before he, too, finally decided that he couldn't make a go of it. My uncle had the studio at the time I first became interested in photography as a hobby as a boy, and it was he who gave me my first instruction in developing film and printing photographs. I remember the darkroom equipment remained stored in a closed off section of the studio-turned-tailor-shop for years, until it was eventually moved to my Uncle Lat's garage.
My father was also active in the Masonic Lodge. As mere boys, he and my Uncle Charles would drive their father to his Masonic meetings around the state, beginning for the both of them a long and close relationship with the Lodge that was to last into their final years. Although they often attended Masonic functions together, they joined separate lodges in Aiken. In Dickinson Lodge No. 314, my father was a Past Worshipful Master, as well as a member of Effingham Chapter No. 10 of the Order of the Eastern Star, and he stood with me during my own initiation into the Lodge.
My father was an ardent church goer. He maintained an affiliation with his mother's church, Union Baptist in Augusta, during the time Mama Cele was alive and after, and even though he joined Friendship Baptist in Aiken in 1975, he kept in touch with Union. He served as deacon in both churches.
After 52 years of dedicated service to the community as a registered pharmacist, this fine man retired in 1984. He and my Uncle Charles then liquidated the drug store's assets and closed the door on a family owned business that had run continuously for 80 years.
In his final years, my father suffered from Parkinson's disease, a neuromuscular disorder that robbed him of his freedom and independence. It was this disease that weakened him such that he was unable to resist the pneumonia that finally took his life at age 86.
A man who knew my father approached me at the funeral and told me he had never heard my father utter an unkind word about anybody. That doesn't surprise me. If there is a legacy he would truly appreciate, I think it would be to be remembered for the way he lived his life. Always ready with a smile, this quiet and refined man was as meticulous in cultivating the courteous manner in which he treated everybody, regardless of station in life, as he was in filling prescriptions.
My Aunt Gwendolyn Johnson Connally recently told me that one of my father's favorite poems was "The Grapevine Swing." Click on the link and it will take you to it.
And so his legacy to me will always be the excellent example he set for me throughout the time I knew him, and which I still find occasion to use daily as a yardstick against which to measure my own reactions to life. Whenever I have a moral issue to be decided, I ask myself what he would have done under similar circumstances, and I immediately have my answer. I well remember how he seemed to know instinctively when to remain silent, rather than take a chance on saying something that may have been offensive or unflattering, a trait I am often hard-pressed to emulate.
I miss my father. But though I can no longer hear
his voice or touch him, in a very real sense, he
can never leave me because he is a part of me, and I
am a part of him that lives on...and for as long as I
remember the lessons he taught, he will continue to
guide me now and in the future, just as he did in the
past.
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