Allen L Johnson

Born in the small Southern Illinois town of Lawrenceville in 1935, Allen Johnson grew up leading a quiet life of sand lot baseball, fishing, camping out, delivering the evening paper and day-dreaming. After college he realized he could live out his early daydreams. His job as a communications engineer with the U.S. Air Force gave him the opportunity to travel and travel he did. In the past 40 years Allen has flown over 5 million miles including circling the globe five times, driven nearly one...See more

Born in the small Southern Illinois town of Lawrenceville in 1935, Allen Johnson grew up leading a quiet life of sand lot baseball, fishing, camping out, delivering the evening paper and day-dreaming. After college he realized he could live out his early daydreams. His job as a communications engineer with the U.S. Air Force gave him the opportunity to travel and travel he did. In the past 40 years Allen has flown over 5 million miles including circling the globe five times, driven nearly one million miles and flown over the Antarctic and the North Pole. Allen met and married his wife, Gloria of Chester, Illinois, while studying electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. After receiving his degree, they traveled to Boston where he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratory designing microwave radio systems. After two years in Boston, they and their two children, Donald and Judy, moved to Dayton, Ohio where Allen worked in an Air Force research laboratory designing and flight testing aircraft radios. After 37 years in the same job, Allen retired in 1996 to spend more time with his family, five grandchildren and two great-granddaughters. Allen's work with the Air Force provided the opportunity to travel extensively. Taking advantage of his professional and personal travel he has chased polar bears across the Canadian Arctic, ridden camels across the Australian Outback, bicycled across Sweden, Canada and the US, kayaked the 40-foot high tides in the Bay of Fundy, skied on the Arctic Ocean in Greenland, swam with sharks in Mexico, jogged the Great Wall of China, climbed volcanoes in Hawaii, hiked the remote mountains of Argentina's Terre del Fuego, biked 4,000 miles from Ohio to Alaska and driven elephants through the streets of New Delhi India. Mr. Johnson chronicles his adventures in articles in the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Sumner Press, Outdoor Indiana Magazine, American Airline's Magazine and numerous special interest journals. Allen has written twelve books. See less