Robert H. Johnson

Memorial services for Bob Johnson will be held on Friday, May 14, 2021 at 10:00 am, at Queen of Heaven Catholic Church, 5311 Phoenix Avenue NE, Albuquerque, NM 87110.  Grave-side services with military honors will be held the same day at approximately 11:30 am, at Fairview Memorial Park, 700 Yale Blvd SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106.

In lieu of flowers, Bob’s family suggests donations to National Jewish Hospital in Denver, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, Roadrunner Foodbank, or to the charity of your choice. 

Lt. Colonel Robert H. Johnson, New Mexico Air National Guard, (ret.) passed away at his home on July 29, 2020, following a brief illness.  Bob was born to Clifton B. (Buster) and Winnie Mignonne (Wolfe) Johnson in Fort Worth, Texas on May 21, 1928.  In 1940, the family moved to Denver, where his mother received treatment for tuberculosis at National Jewish Hospital.  After her death in 1942, he and his father moved to Fort Collins, where Bob graduated from Fort Collins High School in 1945, and briefly attended Colorado State University. 

In 1946, Bob joined the US Army and spent a year in occupied Korea.  He remembered being seasick the entire trip across the Pacific Ocean, both ways, and often told a particularly bad joke about not realizing one could cross the Pacific “by rail,” in memory of his time hanging over the railing of the ship.  After the Army, Bob worked in an auto garage until a too-close encounter with a fan blade took off the tip of his left index finger.  Deciding auto repair was not for him, and falling back on his experience installing glass over summer breaks during high school, Bob visited a local glass shop and spoke directly with the owner.  When telling this story Bob always added, “This was before there were HR departments (to prevent him from speaking directly to the owner).”  The company was opening a shop in Santa Fe and that job offer brought Bob to New Mexico, where he would stay.  Hearing rumors about a draft, both of his Santa Fe roommates joined the New Mexico Air National Guard in 1951.  Not able to afford the rent alone, Bob joined the Guard as well.  He was on active duty from January 1951 through May 1952, stationed in Long Beach, and then returned to New Mexico where he was employed by the Guard.  Bob met Mary Grace Moore at the USO Club in Albuquerque and they married on May 9, 1955.  (He always remembered the year because that was the first year the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series over the New York Yankees!!) 

Except for a stint in mortgage servicing in the early 1960s, Bob worked fulltime for the Guard for nearly 30 years.  In 1962, he tested into officer training school and was commissioned as a Captain in September of that year.  He was called to active duty in 1968 during the USS Pueblo crisis in Korea, and the family spent a year in Del City, Oklahoma where Bob served at Tinker AFB.  Bob was promoted to Major in 1969, and to Lt. Colonel in 1976.  He retired from the Guard in 1979, but stayed connected to his beloved “Tacos” by attending weekly Guard retiree breakfasts and lunches for most of the next 40 years.

After retirement Bob and his long-time Guard friends Tony Metzgar and then Jack Reid, ran an Auto Driveway franchise, an automobile transporting business, for several years.  For a time they rented space from Pastian Bakery on north 2nd Street, and that is how Bob became a friend and customer of Harry Pastian. 

Bob was an accomplished bowler, and bowled in Albuquerque and in local and national tournaments from the 1950s through the early 2010s.  He served as Albuquerque Men’s Bowling Association League Secretary, headed the Lane Certification Committee, and served a term as Association President.  While he never bowled a 300 game, he did roll an 11 strike 279 game in the mid 1970’s.  Bob is a member of the Albuquerque Bowling Association Hall of Fame.    

Bob was a long-time Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers fan, and tolerated that his wife was a New York and San Francisco Giants fan.  He supported the Dallas Cowboys and the Boston Celtics through the good years and the bad.  He enjoyed fishing and golfing, playing slots at Sandia Casino, and watching whatever sports were on TV.  He read a lot, often military history, watched Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and especially enjoyed the Calvin & Hobbes comic strips.   He and wife Mary walked each morning and evening for almost 40 years, and even those neighbors who did not know them by name, recognized “that couple who always walked around the block.” 

As a Christmas gift in 1968, Mary had given Bob a gift certificate for flying lessons.  Bob often commented that he spent every dime of his VA Benefit learning to fly.  Each of his children and some of their spouses, and his oldest grandson, have stories of “the time (dad/grandpa/Bob) took them flying” to see the lights of the city at Christmas or some other special flight.  After his retirement from the Guard, Bob turned his love of flying into a way to travel and earn extra income, flying general aviation aircraft in New Mexico and the southwest until the early 1990s.  One of his favorite paying gigs was taking ranchers to cattle auctions around the state.  He even bought a cowboy hat after one trip when a rancher saw his baseball cap and said, “You must be the pilot.”  Bob enjoyed telling his flying stories, like the time the ground crew left the oil cap off, which prompted a keen eye on the gas gauge while a bead of oil ran up the windshield for most of the flight.  Once, when son Steven complained over the telephone about being stuck at the airport in Denver during a business trip, Bob reminded him, “It is better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than in the air wishing you were on the ground.”   

Bob had a delightful laugh, a quick wit and a quirky sense of humor.  He said his life was like a line from a Frank Sinatra song: “From the brim to the dregs, it was a very good year.”  Even the last two weeks of his life, he always said please and thank you to the nurses and aides, and managed a few jokes.  One evening at the hospital about a week before he died, a nurse asked if he wanted something to eat.  With a wry smile and a slight twinkle in his eye, he replied, “Might as well, I can’t dance.”

Bob is survived by his six children and their families: Mignonne Chaison (husband Robert, deceased); Ann Johnson and son Robert Nelson; Roberta (Robin) Jaramillo; Steven and Naomi Johnson and children Victoria and Antonio; Gale Johnson and son Mark; Mary Adele (Della) Kunkle, her husband Richard Kimmins and her daughter Billie Nicole; and by his two great-grandchildren, Zayl and Drew Ambyr, and by his brother David Johnson (Barbara) and sister Mary Frances Popejoy (Terry), and their families.  He is also survived by several nephews and nieces in Oregon, by extended family in Texas, and by many members of the New Mexico Air National Guard who were his co-workers, bowling league teammates, fishing and golfing buddies, and friends.  Bob was preceded in death by his mother, Mignonne, who died of TB when he was 13; his grandmother Celia Cairns, who helped raise him; his father Bus Johnson; his step-mother Frances Johnson, his mother-in-law Elizabeth Moore; his brother-in-law and sister-in-law Gerald and Mary Moore; his son-in-law Robert Chaison; and his wife Mary Grace Johnson.  When Mary died on May 6, 2019, they were just three days shy of their 64th anniversary.