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3M scientist, inventor, WWII vet still working to improve THe world
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OAK PARK HEIGHTS — If you’re living by the guidelines of former 3M engineer Jim Johnson, it’s never too late to achieve. The WWII vet and former 3M engineer, inventor, college professor and artist — age 92 — is still engaged in important work on a daily basis. Examples? He’s still developing a medical product he patented and he’s sponsoring a venture at the University of Wisconsin-Stout to help K-12 teachers develop connections between technology, values and social domain. Johnson said he’s had a stroke,
but one would never know it by his keen memory for detail, debate skills regarding global warming (his take: it’s far from unprecedented) and in-depth ideas about improving the world via more efficient atomic power. “Whatever abilities or talents have been given to us, it is our job to use them as best we can,” he said of his life philosophy. As a young man, that life outlook sustained him through some of the worst horrors of WWII Germany and Austria.
OVER THERE The native of Norwood, Ohio
was studying engineering as part of the ROTC program at Ohio State University when he volunteered for service in 1942 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was 18. For a number of reasons he was initially delayed in going overseas, but three days after marrying his high school sweetheart Jini in 1945 (“the smartest thing I ever did”) he was shipped to Europe. After the war ended May 8 his engineer battalion (42nd Rainbow Division ) was tasked with driving construction equipment from Dachau, Germany to Salzburg, Austria to dissemble U.S. military bases. Its final destination, Army
headquarters in Salzburg, needed renovations to house people displaced by the war. What he saw along the way would haunt his dreams years later. Most soldiers in his unit had no warning what they’d come across at multiple German concentration camps, many of which had already been operating for 12 years. His unit arrived at the Dachau camp shortly after its liberation; no bodies were evident but inhabitants were too sick or starving to leave and awaited food and medical help from Allied reinforcements.
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