Roland L. Johnson, 82; longtime mariner
As a boy in Quincy, Roland L. Johnson worked at a local boatyard and aboard the yachts of the wealthy. He ran off to sea as soon as he could, serving in the Merchant Marine and in combat in the Navy during three wars. He served on tugs wherever the Navy needed them and on an icebreaker in Antarctica.
When Mr. Johnson retired from the Navy after 26 years, it was not to a rocking chair, but to the more placid waters of New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee, where he took passengers on scenic cruises of its 274 inhabited islands for 10 years aboard the M/S Mount Washington. When he was not sailing, he was making models of ships in bottles or sketching them in pen and ink.
''Roland always told me, 'I need a ship under my feet,' " Mr. Johnson's sister, Caryl McIntire, of Laurel, Md., said Friday.
Mr. Johnson, who skippered or served aboard almost every type of vessel, from tugboat to submarine, died Sept. 29 of multiple organ and renal failure at Triumph Northwest Hospital in Houston after a brief illness. He was 82.
He and his wife, Raewyn A. (Dale), a native New Zealander, moved from Gilford, N.H., to Kingwood, Texas, a year ago.
As captain of the Mount Washington from 1982 to 1992, Mr. Johnson had many celebrities onboard. He once spent two hours in the wheelhouse trading World War II stories with George H.W. Bush, who was vice president at the time.
Mr. Johnson was born in West Medford, the son of Frank D. and Jennie May (Perham). His father was an architect and the family comprised six children from his two marriages. Because of Frank's work, the family lived in a number of places, including Virginia, where he worked on the restoration of the colonial village at Williamsburg.
The family settled in Quincy, where Mr. Johnson, while in high school, got a job in a local boatyard and crewed on yachts owned by such celebrities as Howard Johnson, the restaurant magnate.
In 1941, at 19, Mr. Johnson ''decided a life at sea was what he wanted," according to his daughter, Jenny, of San Francisco. He joined the Merchant Marine and sailed to Australia on the US Merchant Ship West Honaker. During the voyage, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the West Honaker had to make port in Australia to be painted camouflage before it could return home.
In 1942, after the ship reached San Francisco, Mr. Johnson joined the Navy.
''Dad was the most proudly American man I have ever known," Jenny Johnson said. ''He taught my siblings and me the meaning of duty and loyalty."
Mr. Johnson was assigned to the 44th Naval Construction Battalion and sailed aboard the destroyer USS Stormes in the Pacific. He was on the bridge on May 25, 1945, at Okinawa when a Japanese kamikaze plane struck the Stormes.
''Dad never left his post at the wheel; even when it seemed a plane would strike the bridge directly, he simply held the ship's course," Jenny Johnson said.
Twenty-one of the ship's crew members were killed and 15 injured, she said. ''My father proudly told of how she did not sink and made her own way to Kerama Retto." Eventually, the Stormes returned to San Francisco for overhaul.
After serving aboard the Stormes, Mr. Johnson was selected for a two-year Navy ROTC program at Harvard University. After 18 months, he became restless and returned to destroyer duty.
Around 1947, Mr. Johnson took a respite from the Navy for about five years and drove a taxi in Boston, worked on fishing and lobster boats, and sailed yachts to Florida.
In 1950 and 1951, he returned to active duty in Korea. He was stationed in Naples, Italy, in 1952 and in Spain in 1956. In 1960, Mr. Johnson received his commission of warrant officer first-class and was accepted into submariner school at New London, Conn., as a crew member aboard the USS Sarda. In 1961, he joined the crew of the US icebreaker Glacier, during the Operation Deep Freeze Antarctica Expedition.
The crew took shore leave in Wellington, New Zealand, where Mr. Johnson met his future wife. They were married in 1962. From 1967 to 1970, he served aboard the USS Abnaki, another auxiliary fleet tug with a home port of Pearl Harbor. During the Vietnam War, Jenny Johnson said, the Abnaki often was sent to Da Nang for salvage operations and to help move wounded troops from ships to homebound planes.
Mr. Johnson's last three years of duty were spent on shore duty at the New London submarine base, where he was in charge of the entire tug fleet. He retired from the Navy in 1973 at 51 as chief warrant officer fourth-class and moved his family to New Zealand.
There, his daughter said, he went at his shipbuilding in bottles in earnest. Some of his models are exhibited in New Zealand museums. In 1978, he moved his family to Gilford, eventually becoming captain of the Mount Washington.
''Rollie was a helluva boat handler," James Morash, deck officer under Mr. Johnson aboard the Mount Washington and now its captain, said Friday. ''We called him the Old Man out of respect for his years in the Navy. He ran a tight ship but was easy to get along with."
Mr. Johnson was also known for his fish chowder.
''When he passed the recipe to me," Jenny Johnson said, ''he made sure to tell me I had to use real salt pork and heavy cream, otherwise it wasn't real Boston chowder."
Mr. Johnson also leaves four other daughters, Carole O'Toole of Abington, Kathleen Straughn of Pembroke, Teri of Kingwood, Texas, and Virginia of Middletown, Pa.; a son, Navy Lieutenant Lawrence, stationed in Martina Franca, Italy; three other sisters, Phyllis Scannell of Pocasset; Arleen Johnson and Elizabeth Madden, both of Braintree; a brother, Frank of Scarborough, Maine; six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. tomorrow in St. Joseph the Worker Church in Hanson. A celebration of Mr. Johnson's life will follow from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Boston Marriott in Quincy. Burial will be in Arlington National Cemetery early next year.
