Anyone who spends any time in the service will have a story or two about the quirky, weird, and unusual people they run into there.  When young men join the military,  many times it is the first time they are away from their own little worlds.  They are thrown into a microcosm of American society, suddenly faced with people they would never have had anything to do with otherwise.  So what seems quirky, weird, and unusual to a lad from Iowa may seem perfectly normal to someone from the Bronx...and vice versa.  My experience in basic training was a lot like that and I was a Navy brat;  I had been around a lot of different races, ethnicities, religions, creeds and colors all my life.   I spent twenty-six years in the Army;  I met a lot of different kinds of folks, and as much as I tend to lump types together, there are many unique individuals that fit into no mold or group.  True Oners.  And in all that time, I never met anyone like Johnny Johnson.  He was a young sailor in 1961 who worked for my dad, The Chief,  aboard the USS Grapple in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 

Johnny was a mix of the most carefree, fun-loving, free-spirit and a strict adherent to the rules of the Navy.  He loved to hit the beach and tear up the town as much as any sailor, but he was always careful to stay between the lines.  He had a goal:  he was going to retire from the Navy with an Honorable Discharge after twenty years of active duty.  He would not even consider any activity that would jeopardize that goal.  See, Johnny's dad was from Texas and he happened to own a lot of Texas, including hundreds of acres of prime grazing property festooned with a couple hundred hard-at-work oil wells pumping their hearts out.  This Texas oilman had one son, Johnny, and was afraid that, left to his own devices, the boy would grow up to be a bum...a very, very, rich bum.  The old man figured there was one good way to ensure that his son would learn to be a responsible member of society.  He stipulated in his will that Johnny would inherit everything the old man had the day that Johnny retired under honorable conditions from any one of the uniformed services.  And having drafted that up in his will, he rather promptly died; guaranteeing there would be no changes to the will.

Johnny worked as a machinist.  He was good one, too.  He had a '51 Ford with an old flathead motor and a fourspeed transmission he got out of a pick-up truck.  Every weekend, Johnny and his buds from the machine shop would spend Saturday morning working on that old flathead.  They were machinists, not paint and body men, so while that Ford would run like the wind, it looked like a '51 Ford...a well-used '51 Ford.  Their favorite test-drive, to ensure that whatever latest trick they had worked on the engine really improved performance, was to turn her loose on the Pali Cross-Island highway.  It was an uphill run between some very tall mountains that led to the North side of the island. 

One evening on their test drive, they got pulled over for doing over a hundred miles-an-hour in a 60-mph zone.  No amount of Texas charm would dissuade the police officer from writing up a very sizable ticket.  The story of his appearance in court may or may not be 100% accurate, but it is the subject of legend among the crew of the Grapple. 

Johnny showed up in court decked out in his dress white uniform, back when sailors still wore "cracker jacks" and "dixie cup" hats.  He proudly displayed his numerous ribbons and badges and stood straight and tall, the image of what every American mom wants her son to be.  His Texas charm turned up to the max, his politeness and bearing was impeccable.  When it came his turn to speak, he admitted that he might have been a bit over the speed limit.  He explained that he needed to get a good running start to get his old car up that grade.  He was sure that there was no way that old Ford would have been capable of 100 mph even if he had been going downhill.  He asked the judge to look out the window and see for himself what his old Ford looked like (he had made sure he found a parking place that would be visible from the courtroom).  The judge, it turned out, was a bit of a car guy and started asking questions about the engine and what Johnny had done to it.  Johnny was tempted to do a little bragging but checked himself and stressed the fact that it was the original engine and it took a lot of work every week just to keep it on the road.  The judge lowered the charge to something like "ten miles over the speed limit" and Johnny paid his fine and that was that.

A few years later Johnny came through El Cajon and visited the Chief.  A couple of my high school buddies and I met with him later and drove him around for a while;  he told us some raunchy stories about Hong Kong and Seoul and some sea stories about the Ammo ship he was on at the time.  I asked him about his old Ford and found that he still had it;  it  was at home in Texas.  I asked about the court story and he added a few details I hadn't heard at the time it happened.  He laughed and told us that he had told the cop who wrote the ticket exactly how the court appearance would go when he was writing it.  The cop even told the judge that Johnny had told him that.  Judge still wouldn't believe that old flathead would pull Pali grade at 100 mph.  But it would...and did...many, many times...it just got caught once.

I never saw him after that visit,  but the Chief did.  Johnny came by again a year or two later;  I was in the Army by then and gone.  Johnny had had a hard time in Vietnam,  had even been in the hands of the VC for a short time.  But his Navy career was about over and he was looking forward to going back to Texas and spending some real quiet time watching those wells go up and down, up and down ...and spending some of his daddy's money.