Barbara C. Johnson

Barbara Johnson was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1934. She grew up in Newton, a suburb of Boston known at the time for its fine public schools. After attending Bennington College in Vermont for two years, she attended Middlebury College Russian Summer School (1954). Immediately thereafter, for her junior year (1954-1955), when the male:female ratio was 50:1, she enrolled in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Center of International Relations (secretly run by the CIA).

The following year, which would have been her senior year at Bennington, her father, going through a severe financial crisis, suggested that the family could live cheaper in Paris, France, than in Newton. So she and her family spent a few months living delightfully in Paris and the remainder of the year traveling throughout the rest of Europe -- averaging a dollar a head a night.

Upon returning from Europe and facing her family's devastating financial condition, she married, unfortunately, a beau who had graduated from Williams College and was completing a tour in the U.S. Navy as a Lieutenant, JG. Within a week of being wed, her husband was severed from the Navy as a married man and entered Harvard Business School.

They moved to Scarsdale, an affluent town in which the Congregational Church regularly announced on its roadside sign the sermon on "Private Vice and Public Virtue," a town in which the lead actress in the Scarsdale Players' production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible ran off with the Episcopalian church organist.

Ten years later, life found her divorced with two sons and living in Greece on an island in the Argo-Saronic Gulf. Life had become magical for four years. Circumstances brought her and her sons to Israel for the next year. Her fascination with that journey will have to wait for her Memoirs.

In 1971, Barbara continued in and around Boston her editorial work, which she had honed in New York prior to divorcing.

Bored and restless, she tried a few other professions and finally settled on finishing up her senior year at Bennington to get her B.A. and entering New England School of Law in 1983 at the age of 49. In 1987, she received her J.D. She had received an award for her paper selected and submitted by the then-Dean of NESL to the ASCAP Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition: "Patent or Copyright Protection for Computer Programs: A Traditional Legal Comparative Analysis Overlayed with a Linguistic Theory."

Called to the stage during her NESL graduation ceremony, she received the West Publishing Company Corpus Juris Secundum Series Award, 1987, for the highest annual scholastic average.

Thus began her two decades as a sole-practitioner in civil and criminal litigation in State and Federal courts at both the trial and appellate levels. As amicus curiae, she submitted a brief in Dalis v. Buyer Advertising, Inc. (right to jury trial for sex discrimination plaintiff).

As a member of the Children's Rights Council panel, she addressed a joint state-congressional committee on a shared-parenting bill. As an activist-attorney, she received a Woman of the Year award from the Fatherhood Coalition.

Her activism had grown out of her early outside interests: As a film consultant, she advised the Massachusetts Bar Association's Bicentennial Committee. She conceived, produced, and moderated "Think Tank," a cable-TV series (Continental Cablevision in Newton) on local government and business. She contributed to the Boston Phoenix and was a feature writer whose articles appeared in the Newton Times and Micro Economics. Her other works in the world of words are a scenario, a movie script, and a travel book . . . as well as an unpublished faction novel: Cry Rape.

Barbara is currently working on two more nonfiction books to help people who are representing themselves in family court. When finished with the nonfiction, she is planning to switch back to fiction or faction.