My Heroes

Everyone should have heroes…someone they really look up to and admire.

I have a bunch of heroes and they will be presented here sorted into categories.

Family: My parents, Walt and Joreen Johnson both have to fit the heroes category. They were good, and thankfully patient parents to myself, sister Judy, brothers John and Chris and youngest sister Jenny. My siblings are heroes as well…Judy went through a much more complex version of my current malady and fought valiantly until 2019 when she passed away. Brother John continues to practice as an optometrist at age 70, although he insists he is semi-retired. When not peering into other people’s eyes, he is working on renovating the old family home on Bank Street in St. Albans. As a carpenter he is a pretty good optometrist. Chris is an engineer and has worked on everything from airline seats to surgical robots. He now lives in Florida full-time and continues a life-long hobby of growing peppers and brewing Meade. Jenny is the youngest…and she and her husband Jim are my landlords, I live in an apartment in their house. Jenny, principal at Enosburg Elementary has been a huge help in the last couple of months, driving me to appointments and joining me in discussions with my medical group.

Professional/Sportswriting: My three biggest heroes in sports writing are Wells Twombly, Jim Murray and Dan Jenkins and I have had the pleasure of sitting down for an adult beverage or two with all three. Twombly and I shared a birth state, he was born in St. Johnsbury and I in St. Albans and we were our respective state’s Sportswriter of the Year in 1971. He wrote for a variety of papers, primarily the San Francisco Chronicle, and wrote four books and countless magazine articles for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and Playboy. Wells’ approach to sportswriting mirrors mine and although I did not read him regularly (this was pre-internet), my writing style derived from his theory that the keep it simple approach in newspapers was not the way to do it. He enjoyed a special literacy and took an irreverent approach to the sports establishment. I met Wells and Jim Murray, the LA Times and nationally syndicated columnist at a cocktail party at the Sportswriters and Sportcasters Association Awards Program in Winston Salem, NC. Wells introduced me to Murray as the only other writer from Vermont at the festivities. Murray, much like Twombly, had a certain irreverence to go with eloquence. He was a 14-time winner of the California Sportswriter of the Year, 12 consecutively, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns in 1989. I should note that the Vermont Sportscaster of the Year that year was Bob Lobel, who I first met when we were both at UVM. Bob was sportscaster at WVNY in Burlington and then moved to WJOY, hiring me as a college kid to do the football scoreboard show on Saturdays before I signed on with the Free Press later that year.  University of Texas SID Bill Little introduced me to Dan Jenkins, a best-selling author who covered football and golf for Sports Illustrated and other magazines. Dan, Bill and I all shared an affinity for scotch and got together for a couple of rounds of Johnny Walker at a CoSIDA convention.

The Vermont Gang: Free Press sports editor Don Fillion, Mal Boright, who left the Free Press for the Newport Express which opened the door for me to step in as assistant sports editor, Dave Morse and Teddy Ryan, then of the Rutland Herald, John Cunavelis of the Vermont Sunday News and broadcasters Steve Reiter,  George Commo, John “Mugsy” Moynihan, WCAX sportscaster Tony Adams and WDEV’s Ken Squier, who should probably be known as NASCAR’s Ken Squier. Don was the fastest two-finger typist I have ever seen and he and I grew to be good friends in our seven year tenure together. Mal, along with Bob Lobel, was the star of the traveling media All Star Team and Morse and I covered the unbeaten 1972 Middlebury College football team and traveled together on a number of different road trips. Ryan took my place at the Free Press after being Morse’s assistant at the Rutland Herald. We played golf together a few times when I came back to Vermont after a long school year at St. Lawrence and crossed paths when the Saints and the Catamounts played regularly in hockey. John Cunavelis was one of a kind and he taught me quite a bit about page layout and other technical aspects of the business. I did the color commentary for Steve Reiter on UVM basketball broadcasts and some high school football for WDOT and he made a valiant effort to teach me the game of bridge. (Steve was a Grand Master). George Commo is still going strong and has broadcast tons of college games. We would reconnect when St. Lawrence played Norwich in football. My first dwelling upon graduation from UVM was a room in John Moynihan’s house near the Lake in South Burlington. Mugsy warned me about the back door…it opened on a cliff with a dizzying drop. Tony Adams was the face of television broadcast sports in Vermont for a long time. You couldn’t meet a nicer and friendlier man! And, Ken Squier got me into covering NASCAR races when I was with the Messenger and Sunday News and I continued with the Freeps, splitting coverage with Don. I remember one day when Ken came in the office fairly early in the afternoon and asked if I wanted to go to the races…there were none in Vermont that day, but we went in the Catamount Stadium Pace Car to Malta, NY to recruit some drivers for races in Milton. Ken is famous as one of the first television broadcasters of NASCAR races. The track announcer for the Daytona 500. He also broadcast the Daytona 500 on CBS sports.

The Vermont SIDs: Three guys were a big part of my sportswriting career in Burlington. UVM’s Dick Whitter, Dr. George Turner at Norwich and Middlebury’ s Max Peterson. Whit was a special breed of cat and we had some good post-game debriefings at the Roto. Whit was also the one who put me onto the St. Lawrence opening. George was an outstanding communicator and dictated any number of Norwich stories to me when we couldn’t staff a game ourselves and Max was the consummate gentleman and a big help during that great 1972 football season, as well as visits for hockey, basketball and lacrosse. I also was a friend of Gordon Woodworth, Dick’s assistant at UVM who moved on to journalism in the Glens Falls area.

The North Country Gang: I owe a brewery or two to former Clarkson SID Dick Cook as my first several years did not bring much success against arch-rival Clarson. The series between the two teams was closer to even once St. Lawrence started offering athletic grants-in-aid.  Dick, Shiela Stevenson and Gary Mkel were the SIDs at Clarkson during my SLU career and we all got along famously. Rivalries don’t really exist among SIDs and the Clarkson gang, Potsdam’s crew and the fledgling Canton staff were all great to work with. Matt Metcalf, who I met when he was a little kid, built the sports information department at Canton into a first-rate operation and is now a professor in the Sports Management program and does the women’s hockey play by play on ESPN+. The North Country media included some special guys. John O’Donnell and John Day used to come up from Watertown to cover any number of games for the Watertown Times, Greg Gay did some excellent coverage before moving on to become sports editor of the Times and Cap Carey was the Canton office sportswriter and covered a number of big St. Lawrence events. Staying on the print side, Dave Shea of the Ogdensburg Journal and John Turcotte of the Plaindealer gave St. Lawrence good attention. During my radio career, which morphed into radio/ESPN+ I had the pleasure of working with Bob Vilas when we were on ad-less WSLU, a public radio station. We had some classic between the periods fill-ins, but unfortunately few classic games as the Saints were struggling early in my career. Then we went to commercial radio and I worked with Dan Rousanowsky, who was SLU student and stayed on for a couple or three years afterward doing Saint games on the radio. Dan went on to become the radio voice of the San Jose Sharks starting in 1991. He received the NHL’s Foster Hewitt Memorial Award for broadcasting in 2023. Dave Button took over after Dan when he bought the Canton radio station. A football guy, Dave did his best at adjusting to hockey, but made color commentating easy.  I did a significant part of my 1450 or so men’s hockey radio broadcasts with Greg Lapinsky, who first came to town as a writer for the Times and took over as play-by-play announcer in the late 1980s. Greg was excellent at staying with the play, but he did have a tendency to try to referee the game from the press box…I thought I was going to need a tranquilizer dart on more than one occasion.