WYOMING, Ill. (AP) - After almost six decades as the voice of Stark County high school football, 80-year-old Pete Johnson is hanging up his microphone.
The retired pharmacist has been greeting football fans here since 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower was president and Johnson was fresh out of Drake University’s pharmacy program and working at his dad’s downtown drugstore. Generations of families have listened to him call the games from his perch above the football field.
But Johnson has decided to turn over the volunteer job to someone else after the Stark County Rebels’ final home game of the season next Saturday, he told the Journal Star in Peoria (https://bit.ly/1tXG9BI ).
Johnson said schools superintendent Jerry Klooster tried to talk him into keeping the job, but it was time to go.
“It’s not that I couldn’t do it anymore. I just thought that it was time for some young blood, time to turn it over to somebody else,” said Johnson, an all-conference quarterback for the Wyoming Indians in 1952. That team, as well as the Toulon-LaFayette Trojans passed into history in 1992, when the schools consolidated.
He said he doesn’t remember exactly how or why he got started, but he remembers climbing a painter’s ladder to a rickety crow’s-nest just large enough for him and a team scout.
Since then, Johnson has called all home games, with the exception of his two years in the military - though now he works in a rustic but enclosed press box above the field.
“You never have to call him and say, ’Hey, Pete, are you going to be there for the game?’ You know he will be,” said Klooster, whose district now includes much of the county.
Johnson said he’s always tried to report action on the field objectively and avoided using his amplified voice to boost the home team or belittle the visitors. Even his pre-game preparations typically include consulting a visiting coach or official to make sure he knows how to pronounce all the players’ names.
However the games came out, I wanted the people, when they left town, to feel like they’d been treated fairly and with respect,” he said.
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Information from: Journal Star, https://pjstar.com
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