In Memoriam: Elwood Johnson

It is with sadness I report the death of Elwood Andrew Johnson.  Those of you with ties to Lowry will know the name.

Elwood died today, December 7, 2018 in Phoenix, AZ - but his heart was with Lowry, Minnesota
Born 18 Nov 1931 to John C & Nora Johnson, Elwood was 87.

Elwood was one of Lowry, Minnesota's biggest boosters. 

• He was the founder of the "Lowry Group", an adhoc collection of Lowry luminaries.
• He was the webmaster of the Lowry web page: lowrymn.com, a source for all things Lowry.
• He was the force behind the chronicling of the history of every Lowry residence and business. You can view the product of that work in the "Our Home Town" history. [a downloadable .pdf file]. It contains a photo and a genealogy of every building in the Village of Lowry - to the best of the compilers recollections. Elwood did all the photography. Elwood, Glenn Hoplin, Arnold Hedlin (and others I suspect) created the ownership lineage for each property.

Elwood worked for NASA for many years.  

  

From Charles A Biggs Oral History

We put together a team and designed the Apollo 11 van, for lack of a more sophisticated name, which housed the Apollo 11 spacecraft, the whole Apollo, and a lunar rock from Apollo 11. The sides folded down, and we could drive this thing then to the state capitols, open it up, and it would stay there for a few days, and the public would be invited to got through and look at it. Neil Armstrong's parents were deeply moved by the exhibit, and as Johnson described them, "salt of the earth people".

We took that van to fifty states, every state, and ended up going to Hawaii, flew it to Hawaii, and that was the last stop. It took quite a while.

Wright: Did you travel with it at all?

Biggs: No, I didn’t. We hired a good friend of mine [Elwood Johnson], as a matter of fact, to stay with it. Again, in NASA style, we were always on a pretty thin pocketbook. So he would put on his work clothes and set it up, and then he would take his work clothes off and put on his suit and then be there with the inaugural ribbon-cutting.

Read Elwood's NASA story on lowrymn.com HERE.


A fine man, greatly missed.

Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin