'He Loved the University'
U of M Regent Ruth Johnson says her father—who was in World War II before enrolling as a student at the University—had a deep attachment to the school that helped inspire her own service.
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Multigenerational ties to the U of M manifest in many different ways.
For U of M Regent Ruth Johnson, that family link came through her late father Raymond AE Johnson, a third-generation Minnesotan and U of M graduate (Pharm.D. ’51), originally from Willmar, Minnesota.
Like many young adults, Raymond (known as Ray) would join the service in 1939 after graduating from Willmar High School in 1937. He would go on to become a member of the “Greatest Generation,” serving as a Navy medical corpsman for eight years in WWII and seeing action in some of its biggest battles, including both Midway and Guadalcanal.
At war’s end, in 1946, Ray would take part in one more historic endeavor: traveling as a pharmacist’s mate with Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s expedition to the Antarctic during Operation Highjump. It was the fourth of Byrd’s trips to explore what was still a largely unknown continent. Four ships departed from Virginia as part of the Highjump convoy, along with another five that traveled to join them from the West Coast. Ray served on the U.S.S. Canisteo, an oiler that provided support services to the larger fleet.
During that time, he kept a diary. It recounts routine details such as the state of the sea, shipboard activity, and the many books and movies he enjoyed during the extensive five-month voyage. Many of his observations have a lyrical quality: “The moon played hide and seek in the soft clouds, pushed along on a gentle southeast breeze.” His words also reflect the seriousness of the mission and the patriotism of the participants: “[A]s we sail along, we are still reminded of a wonderful country. Ours is a mission, to protect and hold that which we hold dear. This is our heritage and may everyone be worthy.”
There are also flickers of humor. Of a stop the convoy made in Aruba on their way to Antarctica, he notes that some of the shore party got a little out of hand: “One of our boys threw a bottle at a Dutch policeman and received a sword wound, and that’s what I had to fix on my return [to the sick bay on the ship.]”
An auspicious connection
Raymond Johnson wasn’t the only U of M alumnus to travel with Admiral Byrd. In fact, George Washington Gibbs Jr. (B.S. ’63), a graduate of the U of M’s College of Education and Human Development, became the first Black man to step foot on Antarctica in 1940 as part of Byrd’s third expedition.
Gibbs spent 24 years in the U.S. Navy before retiring and enrolling in the U of M for a degree in education. Later, he moved to Rochester, where an elementary school today bears his name, marking his work there as a civil rights leader.
Gibbs died in 2000. As it happens, U of M Regent Ruth Johnson was invited to say a few words to graduating high school seniors the year the elementary school was named in his honor, and George’s widow, Joyce, was in attendance. The two would later become friends and meet for dinner to share stories about the respective Antarctica trips of their loved ones and their deep U of M connections.
To learn more about Gibbs and Antarctica, check out the book The Call of Antarctica, published in 2021 by Gibbs’s daughter, Leilani Raashida Henry, which features excerpts from her father’s expedition diary.
By December 28, 1946, the ship finally entered iceberg-filled waters. It would remain in the Antarctic Circle until beginning its slow return in early March, serving at times as a as a seaplane emergency mooring base and weather station.
“The startling beauty of the pack when it is come-upon under the fog-shrouded midnight sun defies description,” Ray wrote about his first sighting of Antarctica. “As long and as white as the Cliffs of Dover, it lay dead ahead, almost enveloped in a glittering fine mist. It was as if the azure blue of the icebergs we had sighted had evaporated in a brilliant slick drizzle [that] at times, almost blinded those from the bridge.”
Ray worked on a variety of tasks in the medical area during the trip, formulating pharmaceuticals, and even on one occasion, doing minor surgery on a friend with a large cyst behind his ear. After returning home in 1947, he was finally able to enroll in the College of Pharmacy at the U of M with the help of the GI Bill. (During the post-WWII boom, enrollment in the University increased by almost 150 percent in a single year. Army barracks, Quonset huts, and other temporary buildings were set up on campus until more dormitories and academic buildings could be built.)
“He loved the University,” Ruth Johnson says today of her father. “And he was a big Gopher sports fan.”
In fact, her father’s deep passion for the U of M helped encourage her to serve as a regent, even though she herself attended Augsburg before becoming a physician in Rochester.
“His journey from Greater Minnesota to U.S. Navy medical corpsman in both the Pacific and European theaters during WWII, to an Antarctic expedition with Admiral Byrd, and then back to Minnesota and the U of M is quite a story about his generation, the remarkable times, and the transformative power of education,” she says.
Her father would later start a hospital pharmacy in Golden Valley. He died in 1970.
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