On the late William Z. Johnson

 I had never met him and I have serious criticisms of much of the Audio Research equipment I have had to work on over the years, but still, it has to be said that he was a seminal figure in the serious music reproduction business and his success, along with a few others, made the whole high end audio industry-for better and for worse-seem like a real business instead of a few cranks dedicated to building odd and seemingly obsolete stuff.

He was 85 years old, an age when one's passing is, under normal circumstances, more a cause for a fond recollection of a life well lived for those who have succeeded at something beneficial than one for grief or regret. We humans just live a short time in the sun, and then we are no more.

I own an old Atwater Kent radio that was made roughly around the time of Mr. Johnson's birth. It was lovingly restored some years back by a man who himself was of similar vintage and has been, as they say in ham radio, a Silent Key for at least a decade. He died of cancer, heart disease and emphysema and like so many of his generation had drank and smoked heavily. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died and he told me that he knew he'd shortened his lifespan by those behaviors, but he had no regrets: he had lived a full life, worked in the defense plants during WWII-he had a club foot and was designated 4-F-raised two families with two wives (not at the same time), and had seen America in its best days. He had worked for both Saul Marantz and later McIntosh as well as Collins Radio and at one time RCA, on audio projects as well as the Apollo space TV camera and some broadcast equipment. In his dotage he turned to ham radio as well as flying model airplanes and large format photography.  As we are reminded by television productions like "Mad Men", "Pan Am" and the recent film on the alleged romp of Marilyn Monroe with a third assistant director currently screening in art houses, people were different back then.

 As I write this, the radio is playing softly. It is reproducing the barking mad commentary of one of the indifferentiable neo-conservative talk show 'hosts' that are all we hear on AM besides sports. Its tubes, none of which are less than seventy years old, are glowing softly, the original batteries being filled in for by a homebrew A supply and B+ from a surplus switchmode brick in a filtered screened box. It works now as well as it ever did, and that is pretty well.

Life is pretty good for me now, and I hope Mr. Johnson in his last days experienced the contentment my late friend of so much longer years did.