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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (April 29, 2016)
News Page 8 Street Roots • April 29-May 5, 2016 Street Roots • April 29-May 5, 2016 News Hie long incubation of a dream Harold Johnson, a longtime teacher and poet, aspired to write a novel. Decades later, his goal has come to fruition. BY MARTHA GIES CONTRIBUTING WRITER ast fall, Portland poet Harold Johnson launched his novel at Broadway Books, and a standing- room-only crowd filled the Northeast Portland shop to hear him read. Set on Portland, poet Harold Johnson, author of “The Fort Showalter Blues, ” said the years he spent teaching at Portland Night High School were his most fulfilling. a U.S. Army base in the late ’50s, “The Fort Showalter Blues” is a story of a second place - and cash - in a national essay boys were close all through school. Johnson was bom in Yakima, Wash., in young African-American trumpet player contest sponsored by Seventeen magazine. But it was Nat and Betty Rosler, a white 1933, the year President Franklin Roosevelt (Later, when poetry became primary in his Jewish couple from New York, who most took office and began introducing Depression from Portland who gets initiated into life, he realized the young Sylvia Plath had powerfully influenced him. They had come out recovery programs. Late summers during published in the same issue.) the racism of the U.S. armed forces. to Portland to work in the shipyards and had World War II, the whole family would rise at He began to think about college. “Of washed up in Yakima after the war. At the 3:30 in the morning so Johnson’s father could After reading two short sections and course, my buddy, Bob, was aimed toward beginning of Johnson’s junior year, they deliver them to the hop field before going to college all along. And I knew damned well if happened to see a particularly lovely his own job collecting garbage for the city. taking questions from the audience, he could go, I could go. I just had no idea watercolor, signed “Harold Johnson,” hanging “My father was a man with four kids who Johnson closed the program with a how I might pay for it” in their children ’ s elementary school, and probably never made more than $60 a Yet once, back when he was 12 years old asked Johnson ’ s father, who often stopped in month, ” Johnson said. “ I didn ’ t know anybody story he loves to tell, one dating back and caddying for Yakima’s bigwigs out at the at their little convenience store after work, if as poor as we were.” golf course, he’d earned enough money to that might have been painted by his child. to his undergraduate days as an English Despite the hardship, he remembers being buy a trumpet he had coveted for three years, You’d better go down there, his father told a cheerful child. major at the University of Portland. so he knew miracles did happen. Harold, because these people wanted to meet “I loved school. My teachers were all kind The two halves of the college miracle came people.” They especially encouraged his you. “I had a friend in one of my classes, together in quick succession. “So I got to talking about art with Betty and painting and drawing, for which he showed an A University of Portland recruiter showed and we both wanted to be novelists. Nat, and nobody had ever talked to me like early talent up at Yakima High School, and Johnson, an that.” First they hired him to work behind the “It was a white town,” Johnson recalled. “In Charlie was two years older than I, and avid reader of the sports pages, knew that counter, and then, having just had their fourth a town of 30,000 people, I was aware of the Winters brothers - two African- maybe 100 African-Americans.” He would see child, asked him to babysit their children. he told me he figured he could get his Americans with a spectacular talent for them when he visited his maternal “They had lots of books! They gave me novel published by the time he was 30. basketball - both played for that college. grandmother on South Sixth Street, and he ‘Anna Karenina’ to read and ‘The Brothers “Wayne Durrell was this recruiter’s name, described going down to this little four-block Karamazov. ’ And they had all these records: And I remember feeling sorry for him and somehow I talked to him. ‘Oh, yeah, black district as “entering an enchanted Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Beethoven, come on down! Give us a call! Write to us!’” grove.” Where his family lived, up on South because he was going to be so old by Caruso. They had the opera ‘Carmen’!” Then his cousin Lizzy, 23, came up from 11th, he was often the only black child in his Johnson’s voice rose to his original then.” Portland on a surprise Saturday afternoon classroom. excitement, even after all these years. visit Johnson returned home from caddying “My best friend from the first grade was a He worked one year for the Roslers, until Johnson paused for a beat, then to find her standing in the family front yard. white kid who was a very big influence in my they moved back to Ozone Park in his senior smiled broadly for the punch line: “So “And she says, ‘Oh, do come down; you can life.” Bob Linn was the son of college- year, shortly after Johnson’s own father died. live with us!’” educated North Dakota parents who were “I was just pretty much on my own.” here I am, at 81!” Out of his correspondence with Wayne warm and welcoming to Johnson, and the two However, he got straight As, and won b Durrell came the offer of a loan and the promise of help finding work. Sure enough, once he arrived in Portland, the school referred him to a Southwest 12th Avenue and Washington parking lot, where he not only got the job but worked the 5 to 10 p.m. shift six nights a week for all four years of college and straight through the summers. At night, he could study under the light bulb hanging in the parking shack. Meanwhile, he met a number of memorable customers who came through there. Among them, Thurgood Marshall, just one year after Marshall successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court, and Mark Hatfield, then serving in the Oregon Legislature. Johnson lived with Lizzy’s family on Southeast Ivon and took the old Eastmoreland electric trolley coach and two buses to get up north to campus. Yet even with the job and free rent, money was tight. In 1952, Johnson’s first year at University of Portland, the student body was mostly white. The great Jackson Winters had graduated and was playing center for the Harlem Globetrotters, and his brother Jim was serving in Korea. In those days, colleges recruited black kids for their athletic skill, but it was uncommon to recruit them for academic aptitude, and University of Portland was no exception. There were two other black students in his freshman class. Page 9 Mary Frances Bowers, who was with Johnson was a talented student; he was Portland Public Schools from 1973 to 1997, great at memorization and loved languages. remembers Johnson’s work at the night At University of Portland, he took four years school with unwed mothers, gay students, of French and later, working on a master’s at Portland State University, four years of artists and musicians. Italian. . “He was perfect for that,” she said. He was disappointed University of Portland “Harold was a humanist, immensely well- didn’t have an art department, but was educated in several subjects, and he was pleased with the possibilities for writing. funny. He just had a good spirit” “I had a wonderful teacher right away, When he retired from teaching in 1995, Father Michael O’Brien,” Johnson said. “The Johnson served as co-editor for “Fireweed: guy had studied with Robert Penn Warren at Poetry of Western Oregon” for two years. He Minnesota and was really good.” had already been writing and publishing his By “good,” Johnson meant rigorous, and own poetry - in literary journals, two he took classes with O’Brien for four chapbooks and several anthologies - for 25 semesters. years. “He encouraged me by publishing my work Finally, as the new century began, he got in the college lit magazine,” Johnson said. down to business: It was time to write that And it was here that Johnson’s dream of novel. writing a novel began. “The Fort Showalter Blues” took 13 years Geoffrey Chaucer was a beautiful discovery to complete, during which time Johnson’s for him, and he loved Shakespeare class. work was twice internipted by bouts of “Though I didn’t have the money for the cancer. But he rested, treated - chemo the Shakespeare text,” he recalled. first time, radiation the second - and Instead, he used an edition he had seen persevered. When the book advertised on the back of was finally finished to his a comic book during his satisfaction, he did not seek senior year in high an agent. school. “It cost $3, and I “Given my age,” he said, had sent away for it.” He “I didn’t want to be simply made do without "Harold was a humanist, bothered with all that” any of the footnotes and immensely well-educated Instead, he self-published still earned top grades. in several subjects, and be under the imprint Irving He loved it aJL was funny. He just had a Courts, a reference to the By the time he good spirit." Irving Park Tennis Courts. graduated, in 1956, he had accumulated the MARY FRANCES BOWERS, In the long list of activities ' HAROLD JOHNSON'S FORMER at which Johnson excels, credits required for a • COLLEAGUE AT PORTLAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS tennis holds a key position. teaching certificate, which he called his And a beautiful novel it “route to employment.” is, written with a poet’s love He quickly paid off his of language, an artist’s eye school loan teaching for detail, and a musician’s eighth grade at Sitton ear for dialogue. Elementary, was drafted in 1958 and played At the book launch, Paulann Petersen, trumpet with the 62nd Army Band at Fort Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, was seated in Bliss. When he returned to Portland, he the front row. A longtime friend, she had taught at Boise Grammar School for a few championed Johnson’s recent volume of years, then began a Master of Arts in poetry, “Citizenship,” with an enthusiastic Teaching in painting and drawing at Portland back-cover blurb: “Savvy, sassy, satiric, his State. work is so encompassing, so compassionate, At PSU, he met the poet Sandra his poems can sing for a whole nation.” McPherson, who mentored and encouraged “When Harold began to read,” she said his poetry, and the artist Anne Griffin, whom later, “I was transfixed by the voice of the he married in 1971. incomparable Harold. Exactly marvelous. Yes, Meanwhile, in 1969, Portland Public he is.” Schools opened John Adams High School, at Petersen was just one of the many Northeast 39th Avenue and Jessup Street, Portland writers listening to Johnson in the launching a bold new experiment that room that night, but there might have been garnered national attention for its other friends present whom the rest of us conspicuously non-traditional curriculum. could not see: his classmate Charlie, who had Each sub-school had a master teacher, called harbored the same desire for novel-making; a director, who worked with the same group and O’Brien, the English professor who of high school students all four years. expected so much from his students; or Nat Out of Adams was from Portland Night and Betty Rosler, who had briefly and High School, an outreach program to kids angelically descended into Yakima so many who, for one reason or another, could not fit into conventional high school, and with it was decades ago to encourage the young boy in his talent bom Johnson’s true calling. Johnson has an easy comfort with good Johnson’s career flowed smoothly along two channels: writing poetry and teaching fortune. “I do think teaching was a lucky thing,” he troubled kids, many of whom graduated, made their way in the world and still call on said. Then, with a broad smile: “And living him today. long enough to write.” He remembers those years of teaching as his most fulfilling. Martha Gies is the author of “Up All Night” “Those kids that I had during that time, I and of numerous essays and short stories • mean they were really.... ” He could not talk published over the past 30 years. She teaches about them without his voice breaking. in Portland, where she lives, and abroad for “Excuse me a minute,” he said, “but that hit the workshop Traveler’s Mind. me. We were like family.”
