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Abominable Firebug

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Read about a real survivor, not that phony stuff on TV. This book is about a boy who had such a childhood that any run-of-the-mill lawyer could get him off even if he nuked the universe. First his parents kicked him out of the house as soon as he became a teenager. Then he was sent to a work-farm where he worked as an indentured servant (read slave). Next, after he accidentally burns down a barn, the state of Massachusetts incarcerates him as an arsonist in the worst possible juvenile detention center where boys were being raped by the guards (masters) nightly. Surviving this, Johnson is sentenced to a reform school where, because of his horrible past, he thinks he really had a good time.

Johnson goes into great detail about the day-to-day activities at the reform school, the very first one in the United States. A true survivor, Johnson is paroled home after completing his sentence, only to return to the reformatory because his mother told his parole officer that he "stole" (now I'm not kidding here) some ice cream from her refrigerator.

You would think that a teenager's life couldn't get any worse that that, but it does! Eventually, after much trial and tribulation, Johnson moves to another institutional foster home in Boston where he starts to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was a long hard pull crawling through. He even had a science fair project taken away because the government thought it violated national security. Undaunted, Johnson completes another project in about two weeks.

Anyway, the book has a nice ending. It's well written and a pleasure to read. Johnson is an expert stylist and his chapters are short with each headed by a picture. There are several remarkable poems and, at several places Johnson reflects upon an important metaphorical gateway, writing prose which reads like poetry.

One of Johnson's mentors, a chaplain at the reform school, writes the afterword of this book. This is also well written and quite uplifting.

Celebrity autobiographies rarely reveal any surprises. I once discovered that my next door neighbor was an (illegal) arms dealer who lived a fascinating life. Ordinary people who often aren't so ordinary are much more interesting. This book proves it.

I was raised in a fully functional family. To read about anyone who didn't have the same luxury always grabs my attention because it's so unfamiliar to me. I never got in trouble (boring life), so I'm always interested in how I should do it in the next life.

This is a fascinating story of a young boy going through the wringer of the Massachusetts juvenile "correctional" system and coming out the other end as an amazingly versatile adult. I won't tell you the ending, but just say that, if your kid is harder to handle than you'd like, have faith. You may have the makings of a Nobel prize winner on your hands.

This book is an amazing account of a child who survived the Massachusetts juvenile justice system in the fifties. Johnson writes about his early life, starting at about two years of age, he brings us through a foster-home-farm where young boys are forced to do farm-work to earn their keep, and some, including the author, are raped and abused. Johnson then recounts his encounter with the Massachusetts juvenile court system and the Youth Service Board in Roslindale. He recounts torture and rape at that institution where boys were warehoused without a trial until there was an opening at a juvenile penal institution. Later on, Johnson goes to the Lyman School for Boys, which was the nation's first reform school. The school was closed in the seventies.

Johnson tells about his stay at the Lyman School and goes into quite complete detail about the day-to-day activities at the school. Johnson thinks this institution was really quite good by comparison to other places he had been. Johnson then goes to another foster home, Charles Hayden Goodwill Inn, in Boston. While attending school in Roslindale, Johnson stumbles onto some missile secrets while preparing for the Science Fair. A federal judge took his Science Fair project away (no, he was not making a nuclear missile) when his high school teacher got him an audience with a military contractor. With only a couple weeks left, Johnson makes another project and wins well enough so that he gets to show his project in the state Science Fair and he gets another slap on the face.

Anyway, the book continues with Johnson encountering various challenges, which he faces and handles with true grit, an honest-to-goodness survivor. The book ends after Johnson enters the radio and television industry, gets a union job, and meets his first true love.

This is a book about success. It is well written and once you start it, you won't want to put it down. I like the fact that Johnson wastes little time in developing a story so you can read the book in a single sitting. Each chapter, except the last, begins with a picture that hints of the chapter content. I don't think this was an oversight. The last chapter doesn't have a picture because it hasn't ended yet. I think this book is excellent in all ways.

This is a story of severe trials that took place in an earlier time and era, specifically the sixties. The author was classified as a "troubled" boy, rejected by his parents and placed in the juvenile system. At that time, it was not a pleasant experience; some of the facilities were run by sadistic pedophiles that terrorized the boys into being their sexual objects. Some of the abusers were men of the cloth, but given the recent revelations of the actions of many Catholic priests, that news is not surprising. What does surprise me is that the scandal has apparently not yet involved priests and ministers of other denominations. For the "men of god" who sexually abused the author were probably not Catholic.
Richard Johnson is an incredibly bright person, showing genius in both engineering and music. It was those qualities that were a major factor that allowed him to succeed in life despite the enormous odds. The other factor was the few people that he encountered that gave him a chance and showed him kindness. He speaks with great fondness of those people and rightly so. They went so far out of their way and against his reputation to let him do things. Those people are mentioned and should be commended.
The book is also a look back to a time in America that was quite different from the modern age. Johnson describes how the police would beat him whenever they thought they could get away with it. That attitude among the police was not isolated to the eastern Massachusetts area. My friends and relatives described being beaten at the hands of the local police for minor offences, but only when the police felt that there was no risk. Generally this meant that the one being beaten didn't have a respectable parent or other protector who would mount a fierce objection.
Young men were also thrown into a system that was really more a form of incarceration rather than assistance. They had little to no rights, judges could do what they wanted and any attempt at rehabilitation was a consequence of the initiative of individual people.
Fortunately, Johnson survived all of this, becoming successful and having the courage to write about it. He is to be commended for that, many people would have been content to simply be successful.

The way a child sees its universe resides in the delicate and everchanging balance of growing experience
and a dimishing innocence which can never be reclaimed. Ideals such as fairness, honesty and acceptance
are fragile stalks, sometimes bent or broken by adults in their clumsy attempts to realize an image of what proper youth is, or indirectly, to claim vengeance on
their own pasts. In Richard Johnson's detailed and sometimes uncomfortably honest telling of his childhood and adolescence, we are given a
glimpse not only into the events that constituted his sometimes imperiled life as a young man, but also a taste of
the institutions that existed in a time when a child was not his or her own person, but potentially merely a "ward of the state."
Such a child is not treasured, or even thought of as a fellow human being, but as a nuisance and something to be tolerated, controlled or silenced.

It must have been difficult for Mr. Johnson to revisit many of the episodes collected within Abominable Firebug, but he does, surprisingly without malice towards
those who had impact upon him mentally and physically. He treasures the friends he met along his path, protecting those that he could, and somehow managed to develop an empathy for those who suffered along with him. He gives praise to those who in their own way bucked the system; instructors and mentors who felt that there was a better
way to go about things and who became agents of change within their limited realms. And there is humor in some of the authorities he encounters, little men & women put in big positions unsuited to their character. A theme of optimism intersects the often dark recollections contained within the narrative. Mr. Johnson's book is one which will appeal to those who behold the canna flower growing out of the rubble of devastation. This small volume is a very human story with heart and mind firmly connected.

I met Dick when he was eighteen years old just completing the darker years of his life, which dominate his autobiography. Being a qualified electronics expert - at least I thought I was until I met him - I was impressed then confounded by this child's (comparatively) uncanny grasp of broadcast electronics. He was also unusually literate, in my critical opinion, which was equally surprising - I was then as now unimpressed by the overall achievement level of the American educational system. I had taught, briefly, at DeVry, an electronics technical school in Chicago, and had dealt with students who had failed the FCC "first ticket" exams after two years of schooling with that goal in mind. Even though I had such a ticket, I was still impressed by an eighteen-year-old who had managed to get one without a formal course of study.

He was obviously a young man with what nowadays in social science circles would be called issues, but he also had obvious worth beyond the average. I sensed that his past might have included problems such as those he details in his book - after all, I was an orphan from the age of sixteen myself, and met a few unsympathetic people along the way to adulthood who wanted to build their ego at the expense of mine.

I give thanks to whatever instinct has led me, for the most part, to be helpful to others when I can. Those instincts have never been easier to obey or better rewarded than when I did what I could to ease Dick's survival and career forty years ago.

If you are interested in electronics, education, kids, governmental bureaucracy, recent American history, or just aggregate humanity - you should read this book. You will be better qualified to understand and relate to your fellow men, an eminently worthy goal.

Ray Dowell