12e3d9f2   
   From: phil_a@tpg.com.au   
      
      
   >   
   > On the late William Z. Johnson   
   >   
   > I had never met him and I have serious criticisms of much of the   
   > Audio Research equipment I have had to work on over the years, but   
   > still, it has to be said that he was a seminal figure in the serious   
   > music reproduction business and his success, along with a few others,   
   > made the whole high end audio industry-for better and for worse-seem   
   > like a real business instead of a few cranks dedicated to building odd   
   > and seemingly obsolete stuff.   
   >   
   > He was 85 years old, an age when one's passing is, under normal   
   > circumstances, more a cause for a fond recollection of a life well   
   > lived for those who have succeeded at something beneficial than one   
   > for grief or regret. We humans just live a short time in the sun, and   
   > then we are no more.   
   >   
   > I own an old Atwater Kent radio that was made roughly around the time   
   > of Mr. Johnson's birth. It was lovingly restored some years back by a   
   > man who himself was of similar vintage and has been, as they say in   
   > ham radio, a Silent Key for at least a decade. He died of cancer,   
   > heart disease and emphysema and like so many of his generation had   
   > drank and smoked heavily. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died   
   > and he told me that he knew he'd shortened his lifespan by those   
   > behaviors, but he had no regrets: he had lived a full life, worked in   
   > the defense plants during WWII-he had a club foot and was designated 4-   
   > F-raised two families with two wives (not at the same time), and had   
   > seen America in its best days. He had worked for both Saul Marantz and   
   > later McIntosh as well as Collins Radio and at one time RCA, on audio   
   > projects as well as the Apollo space TV camera and some broadcast   
   > equipment. In his dotage he turned to ham radio as well as flying   
   > model airplanes and large format photography.  As we are reminded by   
   > television productions like "Mad Men", "Pan Am" and the recent film on   
   > the alleged romp of Marilyn Monroe with a third assistant director   
   > currently screening in art houses, people were different back then.   
   >   
   > As I write this, the radio is playing softly. It is reproducing the   
   > barking mad commentary of one of the indifferentiable neo-conservative   
   > talk show 'hosts' that are all we hear on AM besides sports. Its   
   > tubes, none of which are less than seventy years old, are glowing   
   > softly, the original batteries being filled in for by a homebrew A   
   > supply and B+ from a surplus switchmode brick in a filtered screened   
   > box. It works now as well as it ever did, and that is pretty well.   
   >   
   > Life is pretty good for me now, and I hope Mr. Johnson in his last   
   > days experienced the contentment my late friend of so much longer   
   > years did.   
   >   
   > Posted by Pendleburt.....   
   >   
   > http://soundandflavor.blogspot.com/2011/12/on-late-william-z-johnson.html   
   >   
      
      
   ** Nice post, very well written too.   
      
      
   ...  Phil   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)