A life in the clouds: Remembering Richard Johnson
August 15, 2012
When asked to talk about her late husband, Richard, Alice Johnson confessed that she didn’t know where to start. After all, how can you condense 85 years of personal triumph and professional success into a 20-minute interview?
In short, you can’t. But that doesn’t mean she can’t paint a vivid picture of the man she shared her life with.
“He lived a full life,” Alice said. “He is known around the world for his hobby, which allowed him to travel the globe and eventually helped shape his career.”
Born in Canada in 1923, Richard discovered the relatively new sport of gliding while growing up in California. A recreational and competitive hobby, gliders use natural air currents and the aerodynamics of aircraft in order to achieve unpowered flight.
At 17 years old, Richard earned his private glider pilot license and flew a craft he built with his brother to a third place finish in the National Gliding Championships.
In 1941, the siblings were earning money by giving glider rides in order to pay for their junior college tuition, but following the events of Pearl Harbor, the military began requisitioning private aircraft to get its fledgling glider program off the ground.
“Dick became the military’s civilian gliding instructor,” Alice said. “But after only one and a half years, he had trained all of the pilots they needed and was unemployed.”
He spent the next five years as a co-pilot with Pan American Airways, while still working on his gliders in his free time. Eventually, he decided that a formal education would help him build better gliders. He contacted Dr. August Raspet at Mississippi State University and soon moved to the Magnolia State to begin working on a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering.
It was there that he met Alice, a student at the neighboring Mississippi University for Women. As the love of his life, she knew gliding would forever be a part of hers.
“From the time we went on our honeymoon, I was part of Dick’s crew—the group that assisted him at competition and pick him up when he landed,” Alice said. “But I got to see much of the world that way.”
For 56 years, she was at his side every step of the way as he won 11 first-place finishes in the gliding national championships, earned 10 trips to the world soaring championships, completed a master’s degree from Stanford University, and retired after 40 years as an aeronautical engineer with Temco Aircraft and Texas Instruments.
Now, as his widow, she is helping ensure that his goals are achieved and his professional legacy properly remembered.
In 2009, she accepted the Precision Strike Association’s Richard H. Johnson Technical Achievement Award on his behalf. This posthumous honor was established in his name and will be awarded annually in recognition of outstanding personal technical achievement resulting in significant contributions to precision strike systems.
The inscription on the trophy explains that Richard personally led the design or redesign of more precision strike airframes than any of his contemporaries. It is estimated that he is responsible for up to 65 percent of the precision strike installments in use today.
Alice also helped fulfill her husband’s last wishes by establishing the Richard H. Johnson Endowed Chair in Aerospace Engineering at Mississippi State University in order to help attract and retain top faculty in the Bagley College of Engineering.
“I am hopeful that this chair will be filled with people who bring new ideas and some of Dick’s spirit to the university he loved,” Alice said.