Don Johnson's 10%

Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." Theodore Sturgeon - 1958Byrne Johnson has extracted this material from journals and letters written by his father, Don Johnson, a pioneer to Rainy Lake on the Minnesota - Ontario border. This volume covers the years from 1936 through 1957 as he moved from the position of caretaker at a private boys' camp to caretaker and boatman for a wealthy industrialist's summer estate. In 1945 he, along with his wife and children, created a small island resort. The following year he turned over the operation of the resort to his wife, Layna, and their children and became the captain of a two story houseboat moored to shore on the Canadian side of the lake where the Minnesota and Ontario Paper Co. entertained customers, executives and their guests. His winter work involved working with pulpwood truckers and scalers at the company storage yard. It also chronicles his experiences as U.S. Coast Guard lamplighter maintaining nearly 50 miles of aids to navigation on the American side of Rainy Lake.This is a rare look at a place of great beauty off of the beaten path, much of which has since become a part of Voyageurs National Park. It is presented in the words of an extremely literate and witty man who shares his joys as well as his disappointments and bouts with melancholy. A keen observer of nature and human nature, his words are scrupulously honest. For most of these years he wrote about 100 words a day in page-a-day journals where he commented on his day's activities, his family life and often with pithy comments on the book he was reading or the movie he had just seen.