The Original Doctor J

My first radio job out of college, in 1984, was working for WRKL in Rockland County New York . I announced high school football games on Saturday and during the week covered insanely boring things like planning board and town hall meetings.

One of the few meetings I actually enjoyed covering was the monthly board of health gathering. I found it interesting and informative to know which restaurants had been fined for health code violations.

At the first board of health meeting I covered, I spoke with a woman who was there for the local newspaper. She warned me about Doctor Fletcher Johnson, the board of health president. She told me he was tough to deal with. When the board of health members walked into the meeting I was struck by how huge Dr. Johnson was. He was about 6’8 and solidly built. All throughout the meeting I kept thinking, “Fletcher Johnson. Where have I heard that name before?”

At the conclusion of the meeting, I went up to Dr. Johnson, a cardiovascular surgeon, while carrying my tape recorder and introduced myself. He didn’t appear all that impressed with me. He wasn’t rude, but he gave the impression he had other, more important things to get to.

Before I began the interview I asked him, “Are you the Fletcher Johnson who played basketball at Duquesne?” He stared at me. Then his eyes lit up. He even smiled.

“How did you know that?” asked the doctor.

I had finally remembered that name from reading a Duquesne University basketball media guide a while back.

“I went Duquesne,” I told him. The glory days of Duquesne basketball were in the mid 1950’s when Fletcher Johnson was a rebounding machine.

Every board of health meeting I went to after that, Dr. Johnson was very friendly and cordial to me. He would even joke around with me. Other members of the media wondered why he would give me information that they had to drag out of him. He would also give me courtside tickets to Knicks and Nets games. I probably shouldn’t have accepted them since it’s likely broke some journalistic ethics. But hey, the tickets were worth more than I was getting paid from the radio station.

In time, I moved on from WRKL and no longer covered the board of health meetings. I’d see Dr. Johnson at Knicks games, and we would say hello or just shoot a wave at each other.

WRKL is no longer on the air, and Dr. Johnson is no longer operating. He passed away last October of pancreatic cancer at the age of 77. He was still working until a week before he passed. The original Dr. J.

Tags: Duquesne University, Fletcher Johnson, New York, radio, Town Meetings

This entry was posted on January 16th, 2009 and is filed under Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.