Dick Spigner Johnson : Home team troubadour
Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Northwest_Profiles/224732/
SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: Dec. 31, 1948, Ashdown Family: Julie and daughters Molly and Sara People say I remind them of Wilford Brimley. When I’m nervous I obsess over details. My most valued pieces of memorabilia are a hotel room key from North Dallas, the River City albums and our daughters ’ baby shoes. My trademark expression is “Quality opportunities.” I’m most comfortable with people who have the confidence to be themselves. Favorite historical character: Will Rogers I want my children to remember not to let the “bed bugs bite.” I knew I was grown up when I started playing music for something other than fun. The book I’ve been recommending lately is Invisible Prey by John Sanford. No bookshelf is complete without John Sanford and Kurt Vonnegut. My all-time favorite movie is The Big Chill. My most embarrassing moment was a holiday party refreshment mishap. One word to sum me up: committed FAYETTEVILLE — Meet Forrest, Forrest Gump.
Not Forrest Gump, aka Tom Hanks (the actor ), but Forrest Gump, aka Dick Johnson (the musician, coach, carpenter, mud engineer and assistant superintendent / athletic director for Fayetteville’s public schools ). “Every phase of my life has been a meandering,” Johnson says. Which is his way of saying that life is like a box of chocolates. Johnson never worked a shrimp boat, but he worked on oil rigs in Dubai and Brazil. He never met Elvis or John Lennon, but he shot the breeze with James Taylor.
He never met Lyndon Johnson or visited the White House, but he shook hands with John F. Kennedy and climbed around in Air Force One.
And, like the fictional Gump, the real-life Johnson has spent plenty of time mowing football fields.
Johnson eventually settled in nicely in Fayetteville, where he went to college, built a home (literally ), reared a family, made a wide range of friendships and shaped one of the top high school athletic programs in the country.
“I’m kind of an eclectic person, and the town of Fayetteville is sort of like me,” Johnson says. “I’m not good at fitting in a box, and I don’t think Fayetteville is, either. I’m grateful for a place to land.”
The fit has worked well for Fayetteville, too. The Bulldogs have won the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s all-sports title as the state’s best athletic program three times since 2001. In 2005, when Sports Illustrated ranked the top high school programs in the nation, Fayetteville’s came in at No. 19.
This year was among the school’s best, making the Bulldogs the front-runner for a fourth allsports trophy. Fayetteville won a state title in football and in girls ’ golf, while finishing second in volleyball, girls’ basketball and boys’ indoor track, and third or tied for third in wrestling and boys’ basketball.
The baseball and softball teams, both two-time defending 7 A champions, will defend their titles beginning Friday. And the Fayetteville boys are considered among the favorites in the 7 A state outdoor track meet, which is May 15.
In a city where much of the focus on athletics falls on the University of Arkansas, Johnson has helped raise more than $ 2 million since 1994 for renovations to the district’s athletic facilities.
“I’m fundamentally shy about things like that,” Johnson says. “But any good school person never stops thinking about the kids. It empowers me. I can ask anybody for anything if it will help the kids.”
In addition to raising money, Johnson has helped the city land several top high school sporting events, including the summer All- Star Games. And at the Weekend of Champions each May, the teams from all classifi cations come to Fayetteville for all the state title games in baseball and softball.
Joe Fennel, an avid runner and promoter of track and fi eld competitions, first met Johnson in the 1980 s when he hired Johnson’s band to play at his restaurant on Dickson Street. He was in the group Johnson took to Little Rock in 2000 to pitch a proposal for moving the high school All-Star Games to Fayetteville. “He went down there and blew those guys away with his presentation,” Fennel says. “He’d done his homework, and he got up there and spoke with great passion. It was amazing. “ He’s a heck of a negotiator. He plays his cards quietly and does a lot of work behind the scenes that a lot of people never see.” Between his music, his coaching and his work raising money, Johnson is among the most widely known leaders in Fayetteville. “I’ve been close to so many people who are just icons, and that’s a real blessing,” he says. “This job causes you to interact with all creatures great and small.”
AIR GUITAR HERO Johnson’s eclectic life got its start in idyllic Ashdown, where he soaked in the culture-shifting tides of the 1950 s and 1960 s while anchored to the traditional mores of a rural, Southern community.
“I probably grew up in the best time that anybody in America ever grew up in. And I mean that,” he says of his southwest Arkansas roots.
He was reared on a steady diet of politics, education and hard work, and he discovered talents for sports and music along the way.
As a toddler, Johnson entertained family and friends with renditions of “Goodnight, Irene,” and he was 5 when he made his public singing debut on The Cowboy John Show. His sister’s third-grade class attended the taping of the show at KTAL’s studios in Texarkana, and his mother took him along. When Cowboy John asked the class if anybody wanted to sing and no one took the offer, Johnson “squared up to the TV and sang ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ complete with air guitar,” he says. “I thought I was launched.”
Johnson didn’t need an audience to put on a show, but the audience generally found him. One of his best friends growing up, T. O. Wilson, recalls the day he found Johnson, not more than 9 at the time, singing while mowing his aunt’s yard.
“You could hear this voice over the roar of the lawn mower,” says Wilson, a Hot Springs house painter and poet, whose writings about Ashdown often include references to Johnson. “It was Dickey singing. I just sat down in the yard across the street and listened. It was just this beautiful voice coming out of this little bitty kid.”
When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, Johnson’s mother gave him permission to miss church so he could watch. Inspired, he bought a $ 5 guitar and learned to play off the back of a Kingston Trio album. He was catching the musical wave of his era.
“There were 1, 760 people in Ashdown back then, and we had six rock ’n’ roll bands,” he says. “We had live music every Saturday at the American Legion.”
When Johnson wasn’t playing music, he was working or playing sports. He spent his summers on the school district’s building crew, eventually acquiring enough skills to build his own house.
“My bosses were teachers, and they didn’t stop teaching just because it was summer,” he says. “We learned all sorts of things.”
But most activities served as little more than a breather between sports seasons for Johnson, who was all-state in football, all-conference in basketball and a state champion in the long jump.
He was a strong-armed quarterback who called his own plays, but Wilson, who caught many of Johnson’s passes, remembers how nervous his friend got before games. In fact, he says, Johnson would throw up before every game — not some games, but every one of them.
“The rest of us never really took the game seriously until after Johnson [threw up ],” Wilson says. “Once D. J. threw up, you put your game face on. Even the coaches set their clocks by it.”
BOY TO MAN Johnson lacked the size to play major college football, and he turned down scholarship offers from Henderson State University in Arkadelphia and Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia. Instead, he enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he gravitated toward other musicians and helped found a popular band that became known as River City. “Our first gig was at Yocum Hall,” says Dale Marlow, the band director at Rogers High School and a trumpet player in the band. “We played a fourhour dance with 13 songs, so there were lots of repeats. But it was with our friends, so everybody enjoyed it.” Johnson says they formed the band to “have fun and meet girls,” and they did both. “He was a freshman orientation counselor when I came up as a high school senior,” says Johnson’s wife, Julie. “Their band played during orientation. That’s how I got to know River City. That’s how I met Dick.”
Dick and Julie married in 1973, shortly after he graduated with a degree in physical education.
By that time, Johnson was taking life and music more seriously. The transition from boy to man began in 1970, when his father died at the age of 54.
“That’s when the band went from just fun to a way to go to school and to take some of the burden off my mother,” he says. The band’s big break came when a friend who worked for a brewery contracted them to write and record six commercials. A representative of Stax Records heard them and asked whether they had enough original material for an album. They lied and said they did; then Johnson and Tommy Bird went to work writing most of the songs that wound up on the River City Street Band album, with tracks that included “Some Other Man,” “ So Many Things” and a nine-minute rendition of “Lamp of Love.” “ It did well enough that they wanted a second album, ” Johnson says. “It didn’t do as well. We had some changes in the band and my marriage and that ended that.” While recording in Memphis, they spent two hours talking with a stranger who turned out to be James Taylor. “We thought he was a janitor,” Johnson says.
‘DON’T GO TO GENTRY’ River City didn’t stay together, but Johnson moved to Memphis in search of fame in the music business.
“That’s what I thought he’d end up doing,” says Wilson, his boyhood friend. “He was Jimmy Buffett before Jimmy Buffett. And if he’d totally dedicated himself to that like he did at being [athletic director ] at Fayetteville, he’d have been great at that.”
Music, however, soon became more hobby than career for Johnson.
“We did six months of the starving songwriter thing,” he says. “Then we took jobs at a private school as teachers for a few months.”
Low on cash, Johnson made a call to an uncle, Jimmy Whala, who was a pioneer in engineering and managing of drilling fluids for offshore oil rigs. Johnson, who studied engineering before changing majors at the UA, moved to Houston, attended “drilling fluids school” and moved to Brazil in 1975 as a “mud engineer.”
“That was one of the biggest eye-opening events of my life,” he says. “I worked on drilling rigs. I got to see the country. I learned pretty decent Portuguese.”
After two years, he and Julie returned to Fayetteville and he spent a semester in graduate school “until the Brazil money started to dry up” and he once again needed a job.
“I went to the education building to see if any jobs were posted, and there was a sign that read, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go to Gentry, ’” says Johnson. So, of course, Johnson called Gentry, and he was hired over the phone. “I was either head coach or assistant for literally every sport they had, boys and girls,” he said. A year later he became the high school’s head football coach. The team hadn’t won a game the year before, but won six in Johnson’s first season and at least nine every year after that. At one point, they won 45 consecutive conference games. From 1982 until 1987, however, Johnson bounced back and forth between coaching and working overseas in the oil industry. “For the first 14 years we were married,” says Julie, “every two years we changed occupations. It was always an adventure.” The adventure continued, but the dynamics of it shifted dramatically with the birth of the Johnsons’ daughters, Molly in 1987 and Sara a year later. “The meandering stopped right then,” Johnson says. “I couldn’t afford to go to the ends of the earth anymore. I locked in. That’s when my career began.” Still, it took Johnson a few more years to fully find his niche in education.
ALL IN THE FAMILY Johnson spent a year coaching at Prairie Grove and three years back at Gentry, but victories were harder to come by after he became head football coach and athletic director at Fayetteville in 1992.
“I had been very successful as a coach, but I didn’t have any experience managing a big staff,” Johnson says. “I went from 45 players to 100 and a staff of two to a staff of eight. I wanted to do a good job, but we weren’t very successful.”
In 1995, with a 14-27 record and only one playoff appearance in four seasons, Johnson took stock of his life as a husband, as a father, as a football coach and as an athletic director. “And I felt like I was failing at all of them,” he says.
So Johnson the athletic director fired Johnson the football coach.
“It was the right time and the right thing to do,” he says. “I was fed up with losing.”
With his focus on running the athletic department, Johnson drew on his knack for inspiring and energizing diverse groups of people — a knack he’d come by naturally.
His grandfather, William Henry Johnson, was a state representative and county judge (using the name Dick Johnson for his political ventures and passing that name on to his grandson ). His brother, Buddy Johnson, is chief of staff for the state house of representatives. And his father spent years on the Ashdown school board and, as its president, led the district through desegregation in the 1960 s. “He has the ability to work with people and relate to people,” Julie says of her husband. “He can be very perceptive, and he has an intuition to understand what they need and what they want without them always saying it.”
TEAMS OF TITLES While upgrading facilities and raising money are markers of success, Johnson says the most important thing he has done is hire good coaches. “That’s one of my greatest sources of pride — to bring these [coaches ] to this community,” he says. As a former football coach, seeing the Bulldogs end a 100-year drought in football with its 7 A title last fall was particularly special for Johnson.
“I really didn’t realize there was a personal pressure on me,” he says. “But I felt such a relief after we won that game. We had been knocking on the door for so long. It was so elusive.”
But Johnson rejoices any time a Fayetteville team wins a state title.
“It’s easy for people to rally around football and basketball,” says Fennel, the sports supporter and promoter. “Those are the money sports, no matter what level you’re playing. But Dick gives the same level of respect to the golf coach or the track coach or the soccer coach. It’s about the kids. We’ve got to have money to do the things we need to do, but Dick’s just got a great grasp of the context of the deal because he never loses sight of the kids.”
In his first off-season as Fayetteville’s athletics director, Johnson noticed how few girls participated in sports throughout the district. So he went to all the English classes in grades 7-11 and handed out a survey asking girls what sport they’d most like to play. The top four were volleyball, basketball, soccer and softball, and of those, Fayetteville offered only basketball.
Fayetteville added those sports, among others. Including cheer and dance teams, which Johnson put under the athletic department’s umbrella, Fayetteville now offers 23 programs.
Johnson’s success as an athletic director generated a natural, if unexpected, outcome: more work.
“Our district has determined that involvement in school activities has a huge impact on schools overall,” Johnson says.
He believes increased involvement in school activities increases achievements in the classroom. In 2006-07, for instance, 62 percent of Fayetteville’s athletes earned some type of scholarship aid for college, but only 20 percent of that was for athletics. Only 26 percent of nonathletes at the school earned scholarships.
Since not every student is athletic or interested in athletics, Johnson’s task is to grow or create other opportunities that foster the same sort of involvement.
“The motivation is to keep kids in school,” he says. “Last year, for instance, we had 146 nonathletes who dropped out. We had one athlete [drop out ].”
Johnson added the title of assistant superintendent for life services and began working on nonsports programs that might engage students. There are “green teams” that promote ideas around environmental stewardship, middle school video clubs that shoot and produce videos, service clubs and the 5-year-old Bulldog Show that airs on a public access channel.
“It’s totally student run,” Johnson says. “Everyone in the room when they do it is a student, except for me.”
Johnson’s new duties keep him on the move, which is a familiar place. Even after he settled into life in Northwest Arkansas, he seldom sat still for long. Last summer he completed a new deck on his home, complete with outdoor furniture he built. He and some friends still have a band, Los Peos, that plays occasionally. And, of course, there’s work, which requires meetings during the days and events many nights.
“One of the unfortunate things about this profession is that it’s very hard on a family,” he says. “Done right, I’ve always felt all of these kids are my kids — all of them. When you do that, then your own family sometimes doesn’t get the spotlight they need from you.
“ I’m trying to make up for that, but I don’t know if you can. Time and experience don’t go by but once. We don’t have many regrets, though. All steps good and bad have led us to where we are, and that’s a pretty good place.” Stephen Caldwell is a former city editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and author of The Dad Zone family column that runs Wednesdays in this newspaper. He and his wife, Suzanne, have four children and two grandchildren.