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November / December 2009
Volume 21, Number 6

A coal oil lamp lit the living room table where 12-year-old J.D. Johnson watched his Dad and uncles “match ends” and match wits at the family’s passionate past-time: dominos. Young J.D. really, really wanted in on the action.

“My place was sitting right beside my Dad, watching,” the longtime Tarrant County Commissioner recalled recently. “I kept asking him, ‘When are you going to let me play?’ And he said, ‘When you learn how.’ I never did play in those games.”

The oil lamp was necessary because there was no electricity at the Johnsons’ Falls County farmhouse until several years later, well into the 1950s, when J.D. turned 15. The 75-acre Johnson place was about a mile from the Falls on the Brazos, the historic fording and camping area for both Indians and white settlers between Marlin and Lott, 25 miles southeast of Waco.

According to the authoritative Handbook of Texas, that part of the state took a long time to recover from the Great Depression. “The Depression caused a 64 percent drop in the number of farms and the value of the farms dropped 55 percent,” the Handbook says about Falls County, which it said “continued to feel the effects of the Depression and had a slow recovery from 1950 to 1983.”

Because the Johnson farm was located on a strip of sandy loam instead of the cotton-rich blackland prairie that dominates the region, the Johnsons’ cash crop was tomatoes, along with watermelons, cantaloupe and corn for the livestock. With no tractor, the plow was mule driven.

But the truck farming operation on its own was not enough to make ends meet, so J.D.’s father, Joe Johnson, drove delivery trucks on the side and worked other odd jobs he could find. Meanwhile, his mother Edith and the kids picked cotton at neighboring farms and sought additional cash any legal way they could.
Commissioner Johnson said that as a youth, he wasn’t really aware that he was growing up in one of the poorer counties in the state.

“I never went hungry and I never went dirty. It wasn’t really that rough on us kids but our parents went through hell, especially my mother. She worked in the fields with us and still served three hot meals a day, cooked on a wood stove. It was a very rough go,” he said. “I learned a lot, learned how to survive. That’s why I’ve always been conservative.”

Life had picked up considerably in 1954 when the Rural Electrification Administration, a Roosevelt initiative created in 1935, finally brought its lines to the Johnson farm. But a couple years later, Joe Johnson finally concluded that they just couldn’t hack it there. He took a “pretty decent job” in Fort Worth and moved the family over to Lott until J.D.’s younger sister Pat graduated from high school two years later.

J.D. had graduated at the age of 17 and latched onto a job at Southwestern Bell. Starting at $42.50 a week, the job’s lowly title was Unlocated Cable Splicer’s Helper. “It was about as low as you could be” at the phone company, he said.

“Unlocated” meant the job required traveling instead of working at a single location. More specifically, the crews he worked with were responsible for changing communities from the old “magneto” service — where a caller cranked the side of the box to signal the operator (“Hello, Miss Ruth?”) he wanted to make a call — to dial phones.

The work took him from Temple to Belton to Lampasas and then to Beaumont to Port Arthur to Orange until he finally got a “located” job in Texas City. When he decided to settle there, he had intended to get married to a Texas City girl he’d met “but then I discovered Galveston and never did date that girl again.”

In the early ‘60s, Johnson was transferred to Dallas, where he got married just about the time President Kennedy called up Johnson and a bunch more National Guardsmen for service during the Cuban missile crisis. The future commissioner served 15 months in Fort Polk (although he still hasn’t forgiven Kennedy for the inconvenience).

Before he buttoned up for the white collar job, J.D. Johnson had lived the full, adventuresome life of a country singer, rodeo contestant and even boxer.

The fisticuffs started when he was 6 years old.

“Our big time of the week was going to town on Saturday night, if the roads weren’t too wet,” Johnson recalled. An open-air boxing ring offered boys a chance to fight for cash — 50 cents for the winner and 25 for the loser.

“Fifty cents was more money than I ever had to spend, so I didn’t lose many of those fights,” he said. By the time he was 15, the purse was upped to $25/winner, $15/loser, with local boys frequently challenged to fight soldiers from Fort Hood. “If I could get to town and get in a fight, I was there, because even the losing money was more that I could make working.”

Johnson could remember only one opponent he couldn’t beat, a fellow named “Dusty Duty.” Dusty Duty not only wore real boxing shorts and shoes along with a robe with his name on the back, but he also turned back-flips in the ring.
“And I’m standing over there barefoot in my Levi’s and no shirt. He never hurt me but he intimidated me. I fought him three times and never did beat him,” J.D. recalled.

Maybe it helped that Johnson played almost all the high school sports (“In a small school, everyone’s got to play just to field a team”), but the combination of being raised on a farm, learning to care for animals through youth organizations and his natural competitiveness prompted him to participate in amateur rodeos through his teens and twenties — bull-riding, bareback and roping. “I roped until I was in my 50s but I couldn’t really compete with the kids,” he said.

Hanging out in rodeo barns meant a heavy dose of country and western music, which Johnson took a crack at for a while. His love of Hank Williams inspired him to start a “little country band” that played Central Texas venues like the Bremond Tavern in Robertson County. Later, while serving his National Guard time in Louisiana, he got up another band whose highlight was playing on the radio for a couple of hours on the Zuella Jamboree show.

His musical taste is focused — “there is no music but country music, and bluegrass,” he said matter-of-factly. Not that he had time for music classes. His talent was based on learning to pick and hum tunes on the guitar, fiddle and harmonica.

When Johnson returned from his stint in the Guard, the phone company returned him back to the business office in Dallas and then moved him to Houston for four years before bringing him back to Dallas. There, Johnson settled his family (son Jody and daughter Tracy) for 10 years in the mid-cities suburbs of Hurst and Bedford, where he helped them focus on after-school fun. He coached “every sport you can coach, from girl’s slow-pitch softball to boxing.”

Back in the ‘50s, his parents had moved from Lott up to Saginaw, a then-rural community in northwest Tarrant County and in 1978, Johnson moved his family there also.

That’s when the community involvement bug bit.

Neighbors talked him into running for the Saginaw City Council. After three years on the council, he found the motivation to run for mayor, and was elected. “I found some things that were not right. The city administrator was not an honest man,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get (the facts) that I needed serving on the council, so I ran for mayor so I’d get a key to city hall.

“That’s how I figured out what he was doing. Long story short, we finally got him indicted.”

During the six years that Johnson served as mayor, he got crossways with an incumbent county commissioner over the town’s call for the county to dig a “rather deep ditch” near a school, a request that got “hung up in school politics.”

“Someone convinced him that it wasn’t the thing to do that close to the school, so I got someone else to do it for us,” he said. “But I thought, if that’s the way he operates with me, he’s probably doing that all over the county. I told the phone company that I wanted to run against him and they gave me a lot of leeway to campaign.”

With a 200-vote margin out of some 50,000 cast, 48-year-old Johnson entered county government in January, 1987. It was a natural fit, he said.

“I can help people and make things happen,” he said. “I very much enjoyed it and still enjoy it.”

It’s been suggested to him that he run for state or federal positions but he prefers county service.

“We’re the group that meets the people and has to face our constituents on a daily basis, and these other levels of government don’t,” he said.

Johnson said the motto he preaches to his 55 employees is “the buck stops here.”
“Probably half the calls we get in our office pertain to cities or another level of government but rather than say, ‘That’s not in my job description, you need to call someone else,’ my office will say, ‘That isn’t in our jurisdiction but let us make some calls. We or the correct agency will get back with you within a certain time.’”

The commissioner believes his citizens expect him to shoot straight.

“I think the key to my success, if you can call it that, is that I’m honest and my word is my bond. People know that I don’t beat around the bush and I don’t talk political language,” he said. “If I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it.”

A secret that not many folks know about J.D. Johnson is that beneath his crusty exterior is a generous heart.

A lot of people are aware that he has a long list of volunteer and financial support for kids but not many are aware that he makes sure every kid who shows animals in the Tarrant County Junior Livestock Show gets a fair deal, and more.
Back when his own kids were active in 4-H, Johnson didn’t appreciate how some contestants might be paid $300 for a hog “and then you’d see the next kid come up there and there wouldn’t even be a $50 bid. They were looking out for the kids, but not all the kids. That ain’t right.”

Johnson decided to do something about it. About 30 years ago, he began soliciting money from friends and businesses each year through a buyer’s pool. Raising as much as $75,000 annually, he goes to the sale and buys the kids’ livestock projects to make sure there are no disappointed frowns on the children’s faces. Then, he makes a point of talking to the auctioneer in advance.

“Once the bidding starts, I figure out what the going rate is going to be and if it looks like it’s around, say $600 this year, I may start the bidding at $300, using my left hand, and if it looks like no one else is bidding,

I’ll bid with my right hand but keep it down low so that the auctioneer knows to accept the bid without letting the youth know I’m bidding against myself. I’ll keep going that way until it gets to $600. The kid thinks that his hog got bid on at $600 and it did — he just doesn’t know who did the bidding.

“They are the future of our nation and I’m going to do what I can to help them.”

Once he graduated from high school, Johnson did learn a little about dominos,
playing with friends and in domino halls. In 1969, J.D. and his dad started a weekly game every Tuesday night at the log cabin community center in Saginaw. On Saturday nights, another group of friends has convened for years at the bar in his barn behind his home. The log cabin games run about five hours and the Saturday night sessions may go from 6:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.

Drinking is not allowed at the community center and gambling is not permitted at either location. ”We’re all friends and when you start gambling, sometimes it’s hard on your friendships,” J.D. said.

The partners games are for serious players only.

“It takes concentration to learn how to read the dominos and the players, figuring out who’s got what in their hands,” Johnson said. “You can do that if you’ve got four players who really know how to play dominos. But if you put an amateur in the game, normally the amateur will win because they don’t play anything right. That’s not enjoyable at all.”

First time the new commissioner attended the annual statewide judges and commissioners conference, it was in El Paso in 1987. Johnson showed up for the domino tournament dressed in a black, pin-striped suit and asked the tournament director, Commissioner Weldon Hicks of Wichita County, if he could play.

“He looked me up and down and asked if I knew how to play and I said, ‘Well, I know how to match ends.’ I didn’t have a partner so he told me to sit off to one side to see if anyone else showed up to join me. I think he thought I was a city slicker who didn’t know how to play.”

Eventually, a commissioner from Dickens County named Red joined him and the new pair won the tournament, without losing a single match. “At the banquet the next night, I heard three different times people asking who won the tournament. And the response was, “it was Red and that damn city slicker from Fort Worth.”
Ever since, Johnson has been a loyal regular at every regional and state conference, only he wears Levi’s and boots. In those 23 years, he’s failed to place twice, won second place four times — and won first place at all the rest.

He did, however, learn that he enjoyed spending time with rural officials as much or more than his urban peers.

“It’s not that there’s not plenty of down-to-earth, grassroots people in urban areas too but in a rural area, you can go down to eat at the local café and in the city, you may go to the petroleum club or the country club to eat,” he said. “I’d much rather be in the café.”

Friendships Johnson developed in the West Texas Judges & Commissioners Association led him to be elected to the leadership chain in that group, as well as the statewide judges and commissioners organization and finally, at the Texas Association of Counties. In December, he will step down after a two-year term as TAC president.

Effective administration of law enforcement and public safety have been key areas of concentration for Johnson’s 23 years with the county. He serves as the commissioners court’s primary liaison to the Sheriff’s Department, the Emergency Services District Number 1, the 9-1-1 Emergency Assistance District, the Medical Examiner’s Office, the Bail Bond Board, the Criminal Justice Council and the District Attorney’s office. Johnson was the first commissioner to be appointed to the state’s Jail Standards Commission, where he served as vice-chair.

The concern for citizen safety runs in the family. His dad worked as police chief in Saginaw and both his son and his son-in-law work as police officers. Johnson himself joined the sheriff’s reserves back in the 1960s.

“I have a lot of respect for law enforcement,” he said. “In 1958, I paid my last traffic ticket.”

On two different occasions during Johnson’s tenure, the individuals who were elected sheriff got crossways with commissioners courts over budget and other issues.

“Both (of the sheriffs) were headstrong and wrong, quite frankly. I worked with them in the first terms and even helped them get re-elected but in both cases, that’s when they turned sour, went south,” Johnson said. “When it gets to that point, well, I helped them in and helped them while they were there, and then I helped them back out (to election defeat).”

Dominos strategy has educated Johnson about dealing with fellow county officials. He doesn’t just listen to what other officials say, he tries to read what’s in their self-interest.

“I try to read everything that everybody does, to learn why they’re doing it,” he said. “You have to learn how these people think and what makes them tick. It’s just studying and reading and understanding.”