TIES THAT BIND - Part I

Ojai man's lessons go beyond fly fishing
By Bret Bradigan

The old man's eyes water with the effort of bringing them into focus. And his gait is often unsteady, as though he treads on uneven ground. His hands hold steady enough for the delicate work he does, but a bout with an immune system disease last year caused his kidneys to shut down, and the treatment for that gave him diabetes.

He's 77 years old, and these ailments are the price you pay for the privilege of living so long.
It's clear that Ray Johnson's days are dwindling. This is how he chooses to spend them.

The kids peer over the unfamiliar instrument, which appears as aluminum grasshoppers fastened to the table's edge. They wrap thread with uncertainty, starting and stopping again. Gradually, though, with doubtful tugs, the arm lengths of red thread and chenille in the needle vise begin to take shape as woolly buggers, one of the simplest flies to tie, and one of the most effective.

"Pull it down so the hackles show through," he said.
"Cool," replied Jesse Marcus, 15, a sophomore at Chaparral High School, peering at his creation. "There's a bug that looks like this?"

Johnson, neatly dressed in polished workboots, creased jeans and flannel shirt, leans over the table, steadying himself on the edge, scrunching up his glasses to get a better view. It is only after several rounds each of his patient instruction and gentle-voiced coaxing that these students end up with something that could fool a trout.

"You should be able to get it down to two or three minutes," he said, directing the efforts of Noé Rodriquez, 17, a senior. "With a big abdomen," Johnson said, as he teased out a loop of thread. Rodriguez asked, "Why? So you can catch a bigger fish?" Johnson's face creased into a smile. "That's a positive attitude."
None of these students at Chaparral High School have tied a fly or cast a fly rod before they met Johnson.

Odds are that few will again. Yet the lesson they learn isn't so much about trout and their habits and the ways to fool them. It is about what one generation has to teach another, about taking time away from their immediate concerns to participate, in a meaningful way, in the life of their community.

They witness what it takes to create a community like Ojai, the countless hours of volunteer service that form the currency of its social capital.

Ray Johnson was born on a fall day in 1925 on a ranch in south-central Wyoming, a town of several hundred people called Baggs. It was, and is, a wide open land, surrounded by the serrated peaks of the Rocky Mountains, with the Little Snake River running through it.

Johnson grew up at a time and in a place when national unemployment soared past 25 percent, and regional unemployment in the intermountain region, where mines shuttered their gates and cattle ranches went from high-dollar auctions to substinence farming, was much higher.
"There were two grocery stores in town, and not enough business to support either one," he said.

What jobs existed were mainly created by the federal government. And Johnson's father, who lost his ranch in the Depression's early years, was one of the lucky few. When he was hired as director of the Works Progress Administration for Carbon County, he came one of the creators of those jobs.
"They built roads, dams, bridges, you name it," he said.

The family moved several times during Johnson's childhood, mostly moving up the Little Snake River Valley. When he was a sophomore in high school, Johnson, his father, mother, and sister moved to Wilmington, Calif., near San Pedro, when his father had landed a job for Getty Oil.

World War II had brought about an end to the Great Depression and had begun an era of great mobility, and opportunity, for the Johnson family, as it had for millions of Americans.

Johnson, though not a large man, played sports with outsized spunk, lettering in football, basketball and baseball at Banning High School. After graduating in 1943, he went to Compton Junior College on an athletic scholarship. After one semester, however, his education was interrupted by enlistment in the U.S. Navy. Most of his tour was spent at the San Diego Repair Base, as an athletic specialist, coaching softball teams and organizing other sports leagues to engage the interest of sailors waiting for overseas deployments. He was demobilized at Terminal Island, five miles from home. "They gave me 15 cents travel pay," he said.

Back in Compton, Johnson was the halfback on the first-ever Junior Rose Bowl in 1946, and, in 1947, played in the first-ever Texas Rose Bowl versus a team from Tyler, Texas.

This was nothing new. His high school baseball team was state champs two years running. "I played on five teams," he said. "Every one was a championship."

After finishing his two years at Compton, Johnson took a partial athletic scholarship, along with his GI Bill, to Pepperdine University, to play on their baseball squad. "It was the sorriest conditions you ever saw," he said. "But they had the most magnificent coach." That coach, John Scolinas, won, and lost, more games than any other coach in Division 1 history, Johnson said.

At five feet, eight inches in height, and 130 pounds, Ray Johnson did not have the luxury of relying on brute physicality. Scolinas taught him to compensate with finesse, with performing a role within the larger scheme of the team. "No matter how small your size, everybody has something to do, he taught us. I was good at hitting, good at turning the double play, could steal a lot of bases." He was not so good, he admits, at hitting the curveball, which put his major league dreams to rest. The team's professional pedigree included, however, the nephew of Hall of Fame pitcher Eddie Plank, and the coach himself was named to Pepperdine's Hall of Fame.

"I was 25 years old when I graduated, was married, so I started teaching school in Orange County," he said. He began his teaching career at Westminster Junior High, then moved to Rancho Alamito in Garden Grove. He retired after 36 years and he and his wife, Pat, moved to Ojai in 1991 "because our oldest daughter lives here, and our first grandchild," he said.

He's taught the craft of building custom fly rods for decades, as well as fly tying and casting. Johnson began volunteering several times a year at Chaparral High School about eight years ago. "I look forward to that so much, getting to know these kids," he said. Johnson said that Garden Grove's population was "smaller than Ojai's, maybe 7,000" when he started teaching. It is now estimated at 169,000 people.

After having a front-row seat to Orange County's explosive growth, he recognizes that Ojai is different, in ways that aren't always easy to quantify. Life's pace is more deliberate, people take time to get to know one another, and perhaps there is a heightened sense of obligation to set aside time for each other. But that's the way it is in most small towns, he admits. "There don't seem to be any bad people here," he said.

Next: Active volunteers like Ray Johnson's are becoming more and more scarce. And that growing disengagement from civic life has real costs.

© 2003 The Ojai Valley News

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