Wayne Johnson of Mill Creek is a Korean War veteran, a farmer and a longtime resident of McDonald County.
He was born on a farm at Ginger Blue, the oldest of 15 children. He graduated from Noel High School in 1950 and went to Great Bend, Kan., where he worked for Western Light and Telephone Company on a water crew. While there, he was drafted into the Army in November 1952 and went to Korea.
He was an infantryman on the front lines, living in bunkers and foxholes.
"We were hungry a lot of the time," he recalled. "We had a lot of C-rations, a lot of beans."
He spent two years in the Army and a little more than a year in Korea. He said it rained a lot there and snowed a lot in the wintertime. He was in Korea when the war ended. He got out of the Army in 1954.
At that time, he spent three years building up a dairy herd at Mill Creek. He married his wife, Rebecca, in 1957. From that time on he milked cows for 33 years. Then he sold the milk cows and got into beef cattle and is still in that today. He has 50 head of cattle. At one time he had more than 100.
He and Rebecca have two daughters and a son, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. They belong to Mill Creek Baptist Church, where he has been a member for 60 years.
The farm where they live was Rebecca's grandmother's farm. Johnson purchased it from her in 1967. It has been in the family since about 1920.
"People tell me I'm a workaholic. I've always liked to work. My passion is running a chainsaw. I tell people if I'm mad, sad or glad, I can run a chainsaw and feel better in 20 minutes."
He said, when he was young, his father got him up at 5:30 every morning to milk cows, and then, after school, he and his siblings went back to work on the farm again.
"We didn't mind the work. It was just part of growing up. I enjoyed those days myself. Families got together on the weekends when I was growing up. They don't do that now. We always made homemade ice cream on the weekends, went to see a Western movie, went swimming, rode horses, pitched horseshoes, went hunting."
Johnson observed how times have changed. He said, when he and his wife got married, they had meat, vegetables and eggs from the farm and she could buy her groceries for the week for $10.
"Now $10 won't get sugar and coffee," he said.
Johnson said he has no plans for retirement.
General News on 04/06/2017