Rody Johnson

Rody Johnson has an undergraduate and a master's degree from the University of Virginia. He worked in aerospace systems management for most of his career. After retirement he was the publisher of three Florida community newspapers. He is the author of four books: Different Battles, In Their Footsteps, The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown, and Chasing the Wind, to be published in 2014. Rody Johnson and his wife Tommye live in Vero Beach, Florida and Lewisburg, West Virginia.

Photo courtesy of Greenbrier Valley Quarterly.

Rody Johnson may winter at his Vero Beach home in Florida, but his Lewisburg roots go way back. In fact a lot further back than mine and yours. In Johnson's popular memoir/historical narrative In Their Footsteps, we follow the author as he retraces his ancestral roots back to the "Coolest Small Town in America's" namesake, General Andrew Lewis. Popular for his clarity of style and voice, Johnson says it took him 12 years to write his first book Different Battles, about his father's World War II adventures with U-Boats off the coast of Florida. Since then Johnson has published Footsteps and The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown, about his long association with the Brooklyn/LA Dodgers and their spring home in Vero Beach. Both of these books were workshopped in Belinda Anderson's (Inaugural Art Class 2007) Greenbrier County writing groups, where critiques and support led both to be published by separate presses (Dodgertown by University of Florida Press) and both now out of print. Next up for Johnson, Chasing the Wind, a return to Greenbrier County with an examination of the controversy surrounding wind turbines. Johnson's books are available locally at The General Lewis Inn and Open Book, and all are available through Amazon when unable to find locally.

6/1/2012

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Josh Baldwin

Greenbrier Valley Quarterly