BORN TO FLY
LA JOHNSTON
INDUCTED
INTO THE
SAM HALL OF
FAME!
By Jim Graham | jimtgraham@yahoo.com
MANY OF YOU might have heard of, or have been helped by, LA Johnston in your RC hobby. I met LA completely by accident, and that chance meeting ultimately changed my life.
One of my first RC airplanes was a flying foam wing. You could not get much more simplistic than that wing, but I was at the front counter of Hobby Lobby International (later known as Hobby Express) in Nashville, Tennessee, looking for some help.
It just so happened that on that day, the phone lines were out and LA wandered to the front counter out of boredom. My wing was lying on the counter with the internal wiring fully exposed. As LA walked by, he looked down at my wiring travesty and a terrible look came across his face. He picked up my wing, looked me squarely in the eye, and said, “You come with me.”
I remember that, at the time, I would have taken help from anyone, so I was incredibly happy that someone took mercy on me and my total lack of RC knowledge. Little did I know that LA spent his days helping RC pilots across the country via mail, email, and on the phone. He was the senior technician at Hobby Lobby. I’ll give you a taste of just how much experience LA really has.
He said, “Who taught you how to solder?” I replied, “No one.” He laughed and said that I was not leaving until every solder joint was perfect. It was then that I got a personal soldering lesson from an RC legend. (I think everyone in this hobby should be proficient at soldering.) I soldered and resoldered every joint until LA approved, and then he let me leave.
As I was walking away, I turned and said, “I think I will work here one day!” Little did I know that, in less than a year, I would be the marketing and public relations person for Hobby Lobby and spend the next 18 years (and counting) in the RC industry.
After going to work at Hobby Lobby, I got to spend more time with LA, and I slowly learned just how involved he has been in the aeronautics world. He related, “My earliest memories of models are the ones I built at my grandfather’s house in 1935 and 1936.” LA received his AMA card in 1946 when his dad took him to the AMA Nats in Wichita, Kansas, so he is a part of AMA’s history!
Fast-forward to 1954, and LA was working in the full-scale aircraft industry. “I started working for Douglas Aircraft. At Douglas, I worked on the RB-66C, the B-47, and then I went to Temco and worked on the TT-1 and Corvus missile. I have worked on the B-70, Convair 880, Convair 990, C-5A, and many more. I got a chance to work at General Dynamics on ground-support equipment for the F-16. I found I loved this type of work because I didn’t have to argue with stress engineers or weight engineers.”
I have to tell a couple of funny stories from LA, when we were gathered around his workbench during lunch breaks. The first one is about two chickens. He said, “About the funniest call I ever had while working at Hobby Lobby occurred shortly after I got set up to answer all the technical calls. The customer never did identify himself, but the conversation went like this:
“Have you got a model airplane big enough to fly a couple of game chickens across the Rio Grande River?”
“I tried to give the customer an honest answer. I asked him how much the birds would weigh and tried to calculate how much space there would be inside the model. I honestly thought one of the Senior Telemaster [airplanes] might have been big enough. I kept that voicemail for some time, and every time we wanted a good laugh, I would replay it.”
Here is another of my favorite LA stories:
“We used to have a loosely organized contest about once a month. I had a big Free Flight model called a Ghoul. It had an 8-foot wingspan and was powered with a .60-size glow engine. It used a parachute for a dethermalizer. The parachute would drop out of a hatch in the bottom of the airplane and create enough drag to bring the airplane out of a thermal.
“On the day of the contest, I got the airplane set up and launched straight up at 12 o’clock. In about 5 minutes, when the dethermalizer was supposed to pop, nothing happened. In another 10 minutes, the airplane disappeared, still going straight up. I decided I couldn’t chase it since it went straight up, so I got something to eat and went to a movie with my wife.
“When we got home that evening, the babysitter said, ‘You had a phone call earlier. I wrote the number down.’ I called the number and the voice at the other end said, ‘I have your model airplane here. It landed in my pasture this afternoon at 5:30.’ When I asked where he lived, he said Caney, Oklahoma. As best that I remember, that was 60 miles away by air.
“We drove to Caney to pick up the plane, and it had absolutely no damage. Five-and-a-half hours in the air. What a story the pilot would have had to tell!”
In September 2020, LA was inducted into the Society of Antique Modelers (SAM) Hall of Fame. This type of flight has been his passion for as long as I have known him, and I know that this was a big deal to him.
The following is some information about LA from Jeff Elliot.
It took nearly two years for 23 friends of LA Johnston to gather in his hometown of Mount Juliet, Tennessee, on September 16, 2020, to celebrate his induction into the SAM Hall of Fame.
LA was originally accepted into the SAM Hall of Fame with the induction ceremony to be held at the 2019 SAM Championships in Nevada, but he was unable to attend. This was rescheduled for the 2020 SAM Championships in Muncie, Indiana, but that was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead of waiting and hoping that a SAM Championships would be held in 2021, LA’s friends lobbied SAM’s board of directors to allow for his induction to take place in his hometown and in the original timeframe for the 2020 SAM Championships.
The board agreed, and SAM President Bob Galler participated via phone to preside over the induction ceremony, which, in addition to a “live” socially distanced audience, was also available on Zoom.
LA expressed his appreciation to the SAM Hall of Fame committee for his selection and to his friends for their perseverance in making this induction ceremony happen. Bob congratulated LA on his achievements and noted how this off-site ceremony was a first for SAM.
I want to congratulate LA on this accomplishment. He certainly deserves all of the praise he can get for being a great ambassador to the hobby that he loves so much!
I mentioned that brief encounter that led to my career in the RC industry, but here is something LA might not know about. That workbench that he taught me to solder on at Hobby Lobby is now my desk in my office. I found it abandoned behind the Hobby Lobby shop and brought it home. Everything I have created for the hobby has been done on the same bench where it all started. Thanks, LA. AMA
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