Bob
Johnson is an engineer.
Even at Taft the yearbook committee was mysterious about what he
had done, although he was ninth in his class. Instead of listing his
credentials, they only wrote “What a Personality!” But his nominator, Joe Popp,
a few years younger and also an engineer, knew that Bob’s interest in
encouraging others to become engineers was an incredible contribution to the
future.
“Fifty years from now my career will be forgotten… what will matter
will be my impact on future generations,” Johnson says. In his 45 years as an
engineer, he concludes, he was at the right place and the right time.
One of his first professional assignments was to inspect Wrigley
Field in the 1970s when the ballpark was having structural issues…a project list
that finally started to be repaired in recent years. He worked on the
Bloomingdale Building, the Mercantile Exchange Center and the South Hall of
McCormick Place. The 2011 recession forced an early retirement, but he got
called back by another architectural firm to inspect all the CTA buildings which
repaired rail cars and third rail equipment.
Since the late 1960s he has also been explaining engineering to the
very young, starting in kindergarten and early elementary grades, a proponent of
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) before the phrase was in
common use. Sometimes it’s about the basics: how a building goes up, and how a building falls down.
One of his early outreach programs was for his daughter’s fourth
grade class. Years later at an engineering awards banquet, one of her former
classmates tapped on his shoulder. “I’m an engineer… That’s why I’m here. I
became an engineer because of your lecture,” the man said.
“I have touched the lives of a lot of children, who may follow a career as an
engineer, or not” Johnson told the Taft audience, “or at the bare minimum,
understand how engineers have changed your world.”