United by New England values and their commitment to excellence, St. Albans Headmaster Charles Martin and community organizer Brooks Johnson forged an unlikely partnership.
By Brooks Clark
On an afternoon in early June of 1965, Brooks Johnson, a 31-year-old community organizer in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, DC, parked his yellow Mercedes 280 SL in a space on Pilgrim Road. On one side of the road, a 12-foot gold statue of George Washington astride Man o’ War loomed atop its 20-foot granite pedestal. On the other side, the 51 Pilgrim Steps ascended to the South Transept entrance of the Washington National Cathedral.
Dapper in Italian loafers, tailored slacks, and a sport coat, Johnson was tall and trim, like the sprinter he had been. He made his way up toward St. Albans School, not quite breaking a sweat in the early summer heat. He walked around St. Albans’ Senior Circle—its center bursting with a Glastonbury Thorn, grown from a cutting in Canterbury, England—and approached the granite and stained-glass Harriet Lane Johnston Building, named for President James Buchanan’s niece, who had endowed the school to educate Cathedral choir boys. For Johnson, who had grown up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, ubiquitous symbols of history and tradition felt familiar.
He pulled open the heavy black wooden door, walked across the hallway’s polished orange tile, through the dark wood walls, fireplace, and oriental rugs of the Commons Room, and into hallway leading to the office of the headmaster. Canon Charles Martin, wearing his clerical collar, blue blazer, and gray flannel pants, invited Johnson into his office.
Johnson sat down and looked into Martin’s kind, downward-slanting eyes and at a craggy face that would have fit well on a weather-worn Vermont farmer in a Norman Rockwell illustration. Martin’s bulldog Mark Antony, the school mascot, was curled up on the carpet and, Johnson remembers, enhanced the air with silent flatulence. Johnson also noticed that Martin, a wrestler at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s, liked to grasp the arms of his chair and push his body up and down, like dips in a gym.
“Mr. True tells me
you’ve done well with the track team,” said Martin.
“That’s good to hear, and we’re hoping you can continue next year. So, what can I do for you?”
Johnson answered, “It seems to me contradictory and ironic that you run an all-white school in a mostly black city.”
Martin’s answer
took Johnson by surprise. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize
something or point out a problem,” he said. “But what are you going to do about
it? When you have identified a solution, come back to me.”
Intrigued by a
Bastion of Privilege
A couple of years before, Johnson, had started a track club at American University, akin to the one he had trained with when he was a law student at the University of Chicago. At AU, Johnson had been impressed by a strapping high school sprinter named Dan Woodruff, who displayed an unusual level of character and maturity as he heeded Johnson’s hard-nosed coaching—and improved. In time Johnson learned that Woodruff was also an all-prep running back, a talented and thoughtful artist, and one of the outstanding students at St. Albans, a mile down Massachusetts Avenue.
Woodruff had the idea for Johnson to help train his high school teammates. At the time the Bulldog track team was ably coached by a crusty, no-nonsense algebra and chemistry teacher named Sam Hoffman. Sam, as the students called him, welcomed help from a man who had been a sprinter at Tufts University and run on the winning 4 x 100-meter relay team in the 1963 Pan American Games.
The St. Albans track was the old, Chariots of Fire style, made out of cinders that turned soft after a rain. It ran a quarter-mile around football and baseball fields carved in a hill leading up to the National Cathedral, where the main bell tower, named Gloria in Excelsis Deo, had been completed and dedicated the year before. At St. Albans, Johnson got to know other young men like Woodruff, including a shot putter named Al Gore, who was also a top student, a school leader, a football and basketball player, and a thoughtful painter.
Johnson had asked his constituents in Adams Morgan about St. Albans. “The neighborhood matriarch, Miss Jackson, told me it was where the elite white people sent their sons to become the leaders of tomorrow,” said Johnson. At the time there were two black students, Frank Snowden and George Haywood, out of 200 in the upper four grades, or “forms” as they were called, in the model of English boys’ schools. The teachers were “masters,” who called students by their last names. Students ate in a refectory, like monks in a monastery, and studied Anglican Church history, including saints like Hairy Mary, who, memorably, picked nits out of her disheveled locks.
In time, Johnson
moved his AU track club to St. Albans.
During the spring of that 1965 school year, Martin had been on sabbatical, awarded after his 15th year as headmaster. In February, March, and April, he had traveled to the Virgin Islands, England, Greece, and Italy. Among the reports on his desk when he returned was one from Lower School Headmaster Alfred True, noting the encouraging results Johnson had achieved with the track program in 1964-65 and hoping the trend would continue in 1965-66. This pleased Martin, a believer at all times in the virtues of athletics and “muscular Christianity” for St. Albans boys. When Johnson had asked to meet with him, he said yes.
This was Washington in the months after the marches in Selma, Alabama, as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 worked its way through Congress.
At a turning point in history, the clergy of the National Cathedral (including my father, Canon Bayard S. Clark) had answered Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to clergy across the country, driven to Selma, and marched with him across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But in the previous decade, St. Albans and the National Cathedral School for Girls had moved at a glacial pace in accepting black students.
When the Supreme Court had handed down its decision in Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954, the presiding bishop of Washington, Angus Dunn, had announced that the Cathedral schools would follow the ruling and integrate. He was given the pejorative nickname “Black Angus” by conservative Episcopalians, and NCS lost many of the female scions of the South, who had previously come north to board in a Cleveland Park estate called Rosedale.
Johnson went back to Adams Morgan and reported his conversation to Miss Jackson. “She chastised me for not answering Canon Martin,” said Brooks. “She said, ‘Fool, you are the solution.’” Within days, Johnson had another meeting with Martin, in which he announced, “I will be the agent of change.”
Martin replied,
“Well, thank you very much, what can you teach? And we need everyone to help
with activities. What can you coach?”
So, in the fall of
1965 Johnson started teaching American history and anthropology and coaching JV
basketball and JV football.
From Florida to
Giving John Alden’s Speech in Plymouth
Johnson had been born February 28, 1934, in Pahokee, Florida. His mother, Dorothy, was a maid, a cook, and a nanny. His father, Henry, shined shoes at his downtown stand in Clearwater. In 1943, when Brooks was in third grade, Dorothy moved him and his sister Helen to Plymouth, Massachusetts, so they could go to integrated schools. Henry did not go with them because, owning his own business, he felt that he had as good a situation as a Negro man could get.
“For me, culturally, the move was a shock,” Brooks said. “I hated the weather. In Florida, we were sort of bourgeois. When we came north, we were at the bottom of the social and economic ladder.” At Cornish-Burton Elementary School, “I was belligerent and became a first-class bully, till someone, Johnny Pinto, kicked my ass in the fourth grade. You can’t go around kicking people’s asses gratuitously. I was embarrassed and set about getting my act together.
In fourth grade, I remember going home and told my mother my fourth-grade teacher was keeping me after school because I was black. It was because I was behind in math. My mother hit me upside the head and I’m still seeing stars. In fifth grade, for the Pilgrim’s Progress pageant, I had prepared the speech by John Alden and won the audition. The question came up of how a black kid could be John Alden. I gave the damn speech.”
At Plymouth Junior High School, Johnson pitched in sandlot baseball, played football with the Boys Club, and played at the Seymour Street Playground.
At Plymouth High, he was on the JV football team his junior year running a single wing as a quarterback and running back. “I was mediocre until my senior year,” he says, “when I matured.” He quarterbacked in an innovative T formation, leading a 2-6 team with three touchdowns. He played point guard on a basketball team that won the Old Colony League championship.
Under the tutelage of track and field coach Carlo Guidaboni, he was all-state in the 400 meters and the long jump. “Guidaboni was a fabulous guy,” says Johnson. “He was giving, strong, fair, totally supportive. He taught shop and did everything as track coach at Plymouth High School.” But Johnson says he got in his own way as an athlete: “I thought I was a genius. It really screwed me up, because I thought I knew everything. I wasn’t as coachable as I could have and should have been.”
In his graduating
class of 177, he was one of six or seven black students but the only one
without a Portuguese surname typical among the region’s longstanding minority
population descended from Cape Verde Islands mariners and fisherman.
In his junior and senior years, Brooks was elected class president, the first black student to hold the office. “Parents called up and raised hell,” Brooks recalled. “It was kind of hard to be black in 1952.” Principal Edgar G. Mongan got the calls from parents who weren’t happy to see a Negro as class president, and Mongan ignored them. Johnson remembers Mongan mostly for rigorously enforcing a strict dress code – ties for boys, no jeans. But his Plymouth High was a meritocracy.
Johnson had beaten out his best friend since fifth grade, the red-haired John “Barney” Hathaway, who had been president their sophomore year. “It was a big deal,” said Brooks, “but it never impacted our relationship.”
The Pilgrim yearbook accurately predicted in its Class Prophecy that Hathaway would become a dental surgeon. It also predicted that Brooks would be speaker of the house.
The theme of the 1952 Pilgrim was “The Threshold of the Atom.” Editor-in-chief Marilyn Griffith lauded the first “atomic furnace, constructed in Harwell, England—a furnace which will not need refueling until the late Twentieth Century.” Griffith went on to note that “plans are being completed to power ships and even planes by atomic power.” The literary section of the yearbook included less optimistic notes, invoking the memory of Hiroshima and the destructive potential of atomic weapons.
Principal Mongan’s letter, “The Threshold of the Future,” advised the graduating seniors to be wary of two commonplace ideas: 1) “I’m as good as any man,” and 2) “I’m entitled to my own opinion.” In the manner of Calvinist New England, Mongan writes, “In the eyes of God and before the law you are as good as the next man—but beyond that you are only as good as you prove yourself to be.” He then notes that “You are entitled to express your opinion; no more than that. Having expressed it, you may have demonstrated nothing except that you are hasty to speak and not too clear in thinking. For your opinion is valueless unless it is based upon an adequate number of relevant facts and is the product of deep and straight thinking.”
The Class Officers
page offered the following description of Johnson:
His personality and sportsmanship helped Brooks to the office of class president. He has served two years on the Student Activities Society and served as its president until he was elected Senior Class President. Brooks is Sports Editor of the PILGRIM and is an important cog of the basketball, football and track team. He has served on many dance committees and is a collector for the Cerebral Palsy Fund. "Brooksie" with his smooth dancing and striking friendliness is a person we will not quickly forget.
The text beside
his senior portrait read,
BROOKS JOHNSON "Brooks" — class president — dynamic personality! — sense of humor — contagious laugh — ability to argue!!—neat—smooth dancer.
John Hathaway, however, also described as a smooth dancer in his senior profile, was named as the best male dancer, along with his female counterpart, Janice Williams. Both were noted for loving argyle socks.
Johnson was steered to Tufts University by an alum named George Marshall. “He was the minister of a Unitarian Universalist Church that I went to, and he put me up for admission.” Johnson was a four-sport athlete for the Jumbos, briefly playing tennis, basketball, and football (the only black person on the team) until he was “banged up.” He was also a 100-meter, 200-meter, and 4 x 400-meter sprinter, long jumper, and high jumper. “I refused to be coached,” said Brooks. He raced against Charlie Jenkins of Villanova, who went on win gold medals in the 400 and 4 x 400-meter relay at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, and eventually took over for the legendary Jumbo Elliott as coach at his alma mater.
Blues and Jazz to
Community Organizing
Johnson went on to law school at the University of Chicago, where he trained with the Chicago Track Club. Aspiring comedian Dick Gregory, a former track star at Southern Illinois University, was a miler working his way into the club scene. In a story about Gregory in the October 1966 Negro Digest, Johnson wrote, “My acquaintance with Greg goes back to 1957. I remember that my first impression of him centered around the fact that he had tremendous drive and ambition. Only one thing mattered to Greg and that was to ‘make it.’ This monomaniacal drive was not only commendable but was also very wise because that was the only way a poor black man could “make it.’”
As Gregory recounted in his first autobiography, one rainy day in June 1959, his wife Lillian had given birth to their daughter Michele in St. Louis, and he, short of bus fare, was sprinting on the streets of Chicago to catch a bus to join them. “In the rain I ran into a guy I knew from the University track team, Brooks Johnson. We both fell down on the sidewalk. Before we got up, I said: ‘Would you loan me ten dollars?’ He never asked why, just reached in his pocket, and then I was up and running again, from the South Side down to the Loop, and I caught the St. Louis bus just as it was pulling out.”
At the Chicago Track Club Johnson trained Willie May, who placed second in the 110-meter hurdles in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. At one point, Johnson and future New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersch sponsored a jazz event together. “The whole idea was to get girls,” Johnson explained.
“Part of the experience was fantastic,” he says, “the politics, jazz, and blues. I was in hog heaven hearing Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters. I coached future bluesman Paul Butterfield of University High School, who was a state champion in the hurdles. I saw Miles Davis at the Sutherland Lounge, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, Lewis Ely. Eddie Harris played sax. Miles was a perfect example of how you should dress if you want to be super hip and cool. He would turn his back to the audience when he was playing. I remember watching a young piano player from Grinnell College in Iowa named Herbie Hancock.”
After two years, Johnson was drafted into the Army. “It was lousy,” he says. “I was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. After one month and 21 days, I got a medical discharge because of a knee from football.”
In the 1963 Pan
American Games, he won gold on the 4 x 100-meter relay at the with Ira
Murchison, Ollan Cassell, and Earl Young.
Johnson’s ambition
for the law dimmed when the father of a law school friend apprised him of the
slim chances a black lawyer had of getting jobs in top firms or corporations.
He got a job at the Chicago School of Business, doing protocol visits for the Institute
for International Education, across from the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue.
In 1963 he went to the home office in Washington, DC, but grew sick of that job
and became a community organizer in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, “berating
people and trying to get them to do things.”
Johnson was drawn to this school where the sons of diplomats (like Woodruff) and senators (like Gore) were asked to probe their creativity in art, test their character in athletics, and carry out academic regimens that would propel them into Stanford (like Woodruff) and Harvard (like Gore).
Johnson quickly came to realize that the St. Albans ethos was very much the Martin ethos. “We bonded because I was from New England,” says Johnson. “If you were from New England, you had a step up with him.”
A Face of Craggy
Permanence
Charles Martin was born July 21, 1906, in Philadelphia. He wrestled at Penn, won a letter in 1927, and graduated a year later. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1933, he later earned his doctorate in theology from the Philadelphia Divinity School. Martin taught and served as chaplain at Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy for 14 years before moving north to serve as rector of St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Burlington, Vermont. He became headmaster of St. Albans in 1949.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a year behind Woodruff and Gore at St. Albans, began an elegant column after Martin’s death in 1997 by describing how Martin would greet boys with a vise-like grip on the back of the neck: “‘My boy!,’ he would thunder. ‘My gosh!’ Then he would proceed to discuss the length of your hair, or your performance in the previous week’s football game, or the fact that you were eating too little of the massive meal on the table—all the while maintaining that iron hold on your neck.”
Ignatius recalled that Martin often reminded him of a tackle he made against arch-rival Landon, calling him “Tackler” thereafter, praise that stuck with him for years. “It’s fair to say that many of his former students, myself included, regarded him as one of the greatest men we ever knew.
“Martin was short and stocky, built like one of the bulldogs that were his constant companions. He had come to St. Albans from Vermont, and his face had the craggy permanence of the Green Mountains: dark eyebrows that pitched steeply down, so they almost obscured his eyes; big teeth that seemed to force his mouth open in a smile; a large beaked nose. There was nothing pretty or soft about the man whatsoever.
“Canon Martin led the school in chapel every morning, with special prayers Friday for the football team. He believed in the curative powers of fresh air, and the refectory windows would be flung open in midwinter, to make sure we got enough of it.
“He was a stoic of the New England variety, who believed that the vigorous, outdoor life and its attendant pain made people better. He refused to close St. Albans for snow days—even in the worst blizzards—which made St. Albans something of a running joke on the morning radio shows in winter, since we were often the one institution in the area that wasn't closed.”
Martin’s chapel
homilies had a way of planting behaviors that would make future families wonder
what Spartan anvil had forged their otherwise empathetic husband or dad. On a
particular snowy morning during flu season in the early 1970s, Martin addressed
the red-nosed,
coughing boys in the Little Sanctuary and praised us for ignoring our sniffles and making it in to school. In words echoing Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day speech, Martin implied that those at home in their beds were weaker and morally inferior to we stalwarts and said they might regret the lessons they did not learn that day.
My classmate Paul Shorb and I internalized these messages—we took praise where we could get it—and in later years wrought them upon our spouses and children. Once, when Paul’s wife, Ellen, was visiting our home, I was pressuring our daughter to get to school despite being unable to breathe from a nasty virus. My wife, Karen, intervened, saying that sometimes Canon Martin’s shake-it-off philosophy could be taken too far. Ellen lit up in a flash of recognition and said, “So that’s where it comes from!” My friend Paul had apparently invoked our get-to-school-at-all-costs mentality in a similar manner in their household.
Although similar stories can be told about the Brooks Johnson approach to life popping up in the future family lives of his student-athletes, it is nonetheless surprising that Martin and Johnson, as different as they were, forged the partnership they did, and that, when Johnson proposed a Risk Program to recruit and provide scholarships promising students from less advantaged parts of Washington, Martin not only said OK, but got behind it.
Johnson called it the Risk Program because that’s what it was: the school was taking a risk on the students and the students were taking a risk on the school. “It gets back to the whole idea of what kind of man he was,” says Johnson, now 89 and still coaching Olympic sprinters at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Buena Vista, Florida, and other tracks in the area.
“It’s hard to appreciate this person unless you can put it into the context of the times. When he was supporting the hell out of our Risk Program, purist educators were saying black kids and disadvantaged kids wouldn’t be able to cut it in a place like St. Albans. The way he led, he was an extremely fair administrator, totally dedicated to the boys. If I said, ‘I think this is good,’ if I could substantiate that it was good for the boys, it was a slam dunk.
“He did favor football over all other sports, because he said that the better the football season, the stronger the year is. It determines the quality of life for the rest of the year for the students.”
Martin insisted that St. Albans prepare students for the realities of the world outside the serene and beautiful grounds of the Cathedral, and he set forth his philosophy in the letters he wrote to school parents that were later collected in several volumes of Letters from a Headmaster's Study.
"The responsibility and opportunity of St. Albans, independent of community and state, free from passing fads and fashions," he wrote in a 1968 letter, "is to hold to some values of the past, to search restlessly for truth in the present, and to maintain a community in which a student can develop his own distinctive individuality."
“He had a fantastic eye,” says Johnson. “Some of the faculty that were allowed to thrive at St. Albans would never have been hired somewhere else.”
My classmate Jerry
Howe played JV football under Brooks (as we called him them, call him now, and
will refer to him for the rest of this story). Jerry, who went on to play
football at Princeton before Harvard Law, has given much thought to how Brooks
fit into what he describes as “the Martin System.”
The Demanding
Masters of the Martin System
In Jerry’s
estimation, St. Albans masters and coaches fell into three groups. The first
group Jerry names after our legendary English teacher Ferdinand E. Ruge, a
hard-boiled character out of The Front Page in a three-piece gray suit
and fedora who smoked filter-less cigarettes and wielded the Harbrace
College Handbook and his own “class notes” to compel three generations of
St. Albans boys to write “clear, concise, reasonably graceful English.”
Ruge’s red pen on compositions would be considered abusive in today’s world: e.g., “Listen in class! I told you no concluding paragraphs! This one is miserable!!!” (Ruge taught us that e.g. stands for exemplia gratia and that i.e. stands for id est, along with hundreds of other items of notations and vocabulary.)
Though tough, Mr. Ruge offered opportunities for redemption. He openly acknowledged that there wasn’t time enough in the school day for most of us to absorb what he was hammering into us. On Saturdays, he said, if the weather was nice, he would be in his garden. If it was inclement, he would be in the classroom, eager to provide help for the floundering.
So, with a deep snow on the ground on a February day in tenth grade, I plodded in, and somehow Mr. Ruge explained to me Harbrace rule 12d, that nonrestrictive phrases and clauses must be set off in commas. Clouds parted and the sun shone through. My life was changed forever. Suddenly, I understood the logic of grammar and everything he was teaching. In preparation for his final, I typed up all the rules in his class notes, which were later collected and published by his colleagues as Ruge Rules.
His final was an editing test. One sentence included the words “a farm in the country.” In a harangue about deleting superfluous words, he had declared with a finger in the air that, “In the United States there is exactly one farm in a city. It is in Brooklyn, New York. You could go and visit it. But otherwise, farms are notoriously found in the country.”
During the test, as he walked by, I poised my pencil on one end of the prepositional phrase and engaged his eye. As I began to run my pencil through the words, I looked at him questioningly. He gave an exaggerated nod.
Jerry’s Ruge Group included but was not limited to, Brooks and three other notables noted here: Dean Stambaugh, the hard-nosed art teacher, previously noted; Henry Seymour, a relentless wrestling coach, short of stature but strident in tone, who instilled the passion in his boys to don sweat clothes beneath plastic rain suits in a 90-degree wrestling room to make weight; and fourth-grade teacher Charles Spicer.
“They were outsized, over the top, and sometimes outlandish,” writes Jerry about the Ruge Group. “They demanded excellence, but more important, all-out commitment to excellence. For them, more was better, and a lot more was a lot better. They were hard graders. At the same time, though, they taught you the skills necessary for success, and did so with precision and clarity.
“In many ways, the members of this group were as iconoclastic as they were iconic. This was a big part of how they got your attention. I seriously doubt whether any of them could have survived, at least without major modification of their teaching methods, in a public school of that era or in any secondary school today.”
Jerry refers to the second group of the Martin System as the “McCune Group,” after the courtly history teacher and eventual headmaster “Gentleman Jack” McCune. Jerry puts these masters and coaches into the “wise mentor” mold. “They were all great educators,” he says. I once heard Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy say in an offhand way that, because of teachers like Jack McCune, he learned more in high school that he had at Princeton.
“But,” writes Jerry, “their approach was less in your face and more in your head. You did not fear them, as you most emphatically did fear the members of the first group. The approach of the McCune group was to convince you that it was better to be educated and cultured, and to know a few things about the world than to be ignorant. Like the Ruge group, they all instilled a passion for learning.
The third group
comprised the balance of the faculty. Many were excellent masters and coaches,
just not particularly inspirational. The Martin System was to balance out the
three groups.”
A Chaplain Ahead
of the Curve on Social Justice
I would add to Jerry’s analysis another leg to the Martin system stool—that of Chaplain Craig Eder, who did much to provide Albanians with an awareness of social justice challenges in the larger world around us.
When Eder was a boy in Philadelphia, his grandmother gave him a red Elgin bicycle from Sears Roebuck. That gift sparked a lifelong love of cycling, and in turn gave 20 years of St. Albans boys a unique and enduring image and experience of what being a school chaplain is all about.
In my mind I can still see Rev Eder, his tall, angular body over his 10-speed, stopping to look back at a pack of B-Form boys pedaling on the C&O Canal towpath as he generously presided over my tenth “bicycling birthday party.”
I can see his light blue eyes and curly blond hair surrounding his prominent forehead. I refer to him as “Rev” because that’s what everyone called him. Even in that memory, his gentle expression and those caring, angelic eyes clearly communicate his unconditional kindness and generosity.
My dad had been Rev’s two-years-older schoolmate at William Penn Charter School, Harvard, and Virginia Theological Seminary.
At different times, both Dad and Rev had said that Penn Charter’s Quakerism gave them each a certain foundation of spiritual humanity that informed their careers as Episcopal clergymen. Though Rev was the son and Dad the grandson of Episcopal rectors, Rev came to the idea of the ministry on the late side of his Harvard years and Dad a couple of years after graduation.
In Rev’s early postings—at All Saints Church on Chevy Chase Circle, then as priest in charge of a small mission in Greenbrier County, W. Va.—he excelled in his work with young people, notably with 4H groups and youth conferences at the Peterkin Camp and Conference Center in Romney, W. Va. In 1953, when Canon Martin was looking for a chaplain, some friends at All Saints mentioned Rev’s name, and Martin sent him a telegram inviting him to come for an interview.
“He said I had a number of interests he thought would be helpful,” Rev recalled. “I liked good music and photography. I’d traveled in Europe, and I was interested in other cultures.” Martin put his hand on the pile he had received from other chaplains and told Rev, “You have much more to offer than all these put together.”
Rev led the Sacred Studies curriculum and Chapel, with Canon Martin presiding. And then there were Rev’s other interests.
When a South Dakota clergyman called “asking if we had something in the way of mission trips,” Rev took five boys on a trip to work among the Dakota Indians. “The most important thing was getting to know Indian people at the bottom of the scale socially,” says Rev. “You get to know human beings and sympathize with their plight.”
A few years later, it became the fashion to take groups to reservations, a Sioux friend of Rev’s noted wryly, “These people just come here to see Indians.” Rev took it as a compliment when he quickly added, “I don’t mean you. You come to make friends.”
“In the 50s Rev was way ahead of the curve,” says the Rev. George Goodrich ’71, now a Presbyterian minister in Montana. “The way he taught spirituality was experiential. He provided opportunities for young men to engage life and other people and grow as they met others and served others in other cultural contexts.”
These contexts included weekend work camps to Philadelphia and inner-city Washington and Baltimore, and summer mission trips to countries like Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Kenya, and Japan.
The Bicycle Club started in the early 60s with trips to Great Falls and other spots around Washington. “In its first years it was for some boys who didn’t fit in with any other part of the athletic program,” says Rev. It grew into bicycling trips in Europe, England, and Japan.
In teaching Sacred Studies, Rev was perhaps too nice, and some boys (like me) took advantage and misbehaved. “As I look back,” said Rev, “I regret my failure to have strict discipline. It really bothered me. It wasn’t good. I’m not disciplined at my work. A lot of it is by inspiration, and sometimes the inspiration doesn’t come through. My regret is that I wasn’t better organized the whole way through.”
In fact, we learned much more from Rev as he was than we could have from another disciplinarian among the many—although some of us took a while. “He walked a little holier,” says Goodrich, “closer to that Christian ideal. I don’t think we had a reference for someone who was truly trying to walk in Christlikeness.”
All this comprised
the rarified world [“Avoid dreary clichés!” Mr. Ruge would scrawl here,
circling the expression ‘rarified world’] that Brooks Johnson, wearing Italian
leather shoes entered in the fall of 1965.
The Cathedral
Close Was Never the Same
Bobby Clayton, who had come to St. Albans from Gordon Junior High that fall, remembers his first glimpse of Brooks as he got out of his yellow Mercedes and walked up Pilgrim Road—dapper, confident, and articulate. Clayton said to himself, “I can identify with this man.”
Before too long Clayton also learned that Johnson was committed to excellence in all things. “By coming into my life,” says Clayton, a partner at Goldstein & McClintock and former associate dean of Tulane law school, “he gave me a belief in myself. There wasn’t any race we couldn’t win because he told us that we could. He did it to make each of us better as a man, as an athlete, and to make you a winner in life.”
George Haywood, another of St. Albans’ handful of black students, also remembers Brooks’ first day: “He was a unique person and a natural phenomenon. He did not seem to be the least bit intimidated. From that point on, the Cathedral Close was never the same.”
Johnson quickly established his credentials among the faculty hard asses. At track practice one day Brooks told George he was slow. “How many letters in slow?” he asked. “S-l-o-w. Four. That’s how many laps I ran.” A few weeks later, George followed a whim to revisit his pitching skills and joined a baseball practice. Brooks saw him and yelled, “How many letters in ‘I shouldn’t be pitching a baseball?”
“I nearly fainted when I thought about how many punitive laps I would have to run for pitching a baseball,” said George, “but Brooks let me off with a warning.” But there was always a purpose.
In JV football Brooks had shown Howe the lesson of “the impossible best. He taught us that you could go after and achieve things that were so far beyond what you thought you could do.” This instruction occasionally included – as unthinkable as it would be in today’s world – Brooks grabbing Jerry’s facemask, twisting his helmet from side to side, and explaining with an unrepeatable simile that Jerry was running the football with unacceptable indifference.
Brooks’ use of salty language soon tested Martin’s commitment.
“When I was teaching eighth grade at some point in the late 60s or early 70s,” says Johnson, “I called a boy a little jive-ass motherfucker. When the father complained, Canon Martin said, ‘You are absolutely right. This kind of language has no place at any school, especially a school of faith. But Mr. Johnson brings special gifts to the school, and if you want to withdraw your son, I will totally understand.’ A lesser person would have said, ‘You gotta go.’ There were 99 things that could have gotten me fired, but there was one thing that kept me retained. He allowed me to be me. Only a very confident and trusting man could have allowed me the freedom I was given.”
In his afterschool track club, Brooks coached Spingarn High student Esther Stroy, the daughter of a cab driver, onto the 1968 US Olympic team. She ran the 400 meters in Mexico City at 15, the youngest competitor in the games. That year Brooks also launched the Risk Program.
Bob Wisdom, who graduated from St. Albans in 1972, got to know Brooks amid the turmoil of 1968—the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the riots in DC, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s fists in the air at the Olympics. “In Jamaica,” said Bob, “we have a person who has the savagery, the Steppin’ Razor. I looked at Brooks, with his eyes like a panther’s, and thought, ‘this cat is relevant.’”
Steve Hawkins, class of 1973, also met Brooks in those turbulent years: “With Vietnam raging and my father away at war, Brooks plucked me out of the black community of Washington, DC, to St. Albans. I’ve been able to do what I have because I learned how to study, and thanks to Ruge I learned how to write.”
My classmate John
Chafee, another multi-talented senator’s son, remembers his first track
practice with Brooks. “We had bused to the high-banked outdoor track on the
Georgetown University campus. The practice has been, well, pleasant. Some
stretching, some jogging, a few laps. I thought, Yeah, I can handle this. The
second day, we entered Brooks’s House of Pain. Halfway through the workout, I
was seeing spots, people were doubled over, and some
“Through it all, Brooks was unmoved. ‘Thirty seconds,’ he’d call out calmly, and soon we’d stumble to the line, to launch anew. The next day brought no merciful ‘recovery day.’ That workout was rough, too. As it turned out, though, those two days were the worst of it—practice never felt as painful again. But I won’t forget the shock of that first day—the real first day—and Brooks, serene and businesslike, calling out splits and countdowns, allowing no notion of not seeing the mission through.
Bob Baer, a year behind us, complained to his father, a US Army general, about the unfair demands Brooks was making on him. General Baer met with Brooks and said, “Son, I don’t know what you’re talking about: Coach Johnson is absolutely correct.” Mike Cobb, class of 1973, said this was a key to Brooks’ success: “He had the parents with him.”
My classmate Warren Strudwick, one of only three Black students in our class, would agree. “When I was on the track team in eighth grade, I had an argument with one of our classmates,” Warren remembers. “I felt disrespected and punched him in the nose. Brooks arrived for his normal pre-practice discussion and asked the young man why his nose was bleeding. He said ‘Strudwick hit me.’
“Brooks looked at me and following a string of expletives, grabbed a spiked track shoe, and came after me. I was very fast at the time but wasn't sure I could complete with an Olympic athlete. Nevertheless, I took off and began running loops around the Lower Field grass with Brooks in pursuit. As I was running, assessing that I was in fact faster than him and he would never catch me, I considered the end game. Whatever happened it was not going to end well for me. I stopped and dropped to the ground. He beat me with that shoe like he was my stepdad and sent me crying to the locker room. I told my parents when I got home, and they immediately called a meeting with Brooks and Canon Martin. I was certain to get my revenge for that abusive beating. Instead, after the hour-long conference, it was concluded by the consensus of the group that I had been tried, found guilty, and appropriately punished by Mr. Johnson. He privately told my parents that I would have a hard time succeeding in the predominantly white environment at St Albans if I continued to act that way. My parents and Brooks became completely bonded and their allyship aligned me with Brooks, helping me navigate the complexity of being at St Albans.”
One parent, well known for her hard-nosed approach to raising her four boys, bonded with Brooks after an episode in JV basketball: "I clearly remember running steps, lots of them, for infractions like 'lack of hustle' and 'goofing off,' " recalls my classmate Marvin Bush, the youngest son of the late George and Barbara Bush.
“On one particular occasion, my step-running after practice delayed a carful of kids from heading home in my mom's carpool. She hustled into the Old Gym with the car running outside and approached Coach Johnson with a question like, 'When will Marvin be done with practice?' He looked her straight in the eye and answered, 'When he's done.' To this day I'm not sure I've ever seen a look like that on my mom's face--a look of utter respect and appreciation."
As a member of Brooks’ Jazz Club, Jon Sade understood Brooks’ use of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis to illustrate the creative points of sprinting and hurdling. Jon also had an appreciation for Johnson’s mellifluous use of certain iambs of phraseology. As a gesture to propriety, he often adapted the word that almost got him fired to “motor scooter,’ but the meter and the effect were the same. “I was behind in my vocabulary,” said Jon. “One day, in a Cultural Anthropology discussion of Watergate, I learned that ‘prevaricating motor scooter’ means the same as ‘liar.’ ”
Jon picked up another vocabulary word when he found himself on all fours losing his lunch during a rigorous track practice. “Brooks told me, ‘Quit your f --- in’ histrionics.’ I thought I was just barfing.” In an athletic dedication in the 1974 Albanian yearbook, Jon asked Brooks how he would like a student to remember him. Brooks replied, “I’d like him to remember that I did my damnedest to make him do his damnedest.”
In the mid 1970s,
Brooks turned over the leadership of the Risk Program to Skip Grant, for whom
the program was eventually re-named. The photo below is from St. Albans
School: The First Hundred Years.
Life After STA and
All That Jazz
In 1975, Brooks took a job as an assistant track coach at the University of Florida. “It was to satisfy my ego by coaching at a big college,” he explains. In 1979, he moved to Stanford to become its first black head track coach. His wife, Deanne, was from California. The job came open – also Harvard and the University of Miami.
John Chafee went on to run for Harvard. “In the year after college,” wrote John, “I was reluctant to give up running. Brooks, who was coaching the men’s and women’s track teams at Stanford, kindly said I could train with them. One Saturday, I traveled with the team to a big track meet in Modesto, the heart of farming country in California’s Big Valley.
“Johnny Grey, the American record-holder in the 800 meters, happened to be running in the meet. The Stanford runners seemed to perform well as the afternoon rolled on; some seniors even notched personal bests. Later, in the golden rays of the afternoon, with the team bus loaded and ready to go, Brooks got up to address the team.
“ ‘I saw a movie the other night,’ he said. ‘It was called All That Jazz. It’s about a real dance company, and its director and choreographer, a guy named Bob Fosse. In the movie, the Fosse character tells one of the dancers, “I may not be able to make you great, but I can make you better.” Well, today, you were better.’
“Brooks continued briefly about the team’s performance, highlighting a few. He seemed moved. Then he signaled the driver, and the bus quietly rolled off. It is a classic scene, replayed countless times: the coach addressing the team on the bus. Few coaches, I’ll venture, have referenced Bob Fosse and All That Jazz, or made simply improving sound so worthy and exalted.”
During his tenure at Stanford, Brooks was also the head women’s coach for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics for a team that included Evelyn Ashford and Chandra Cheeseborough.
At Stanford, he conducted a noncredit class in the athletic department called “Jazz, Sports, and Society.” One of his athletes, middle distance runner Jeff Atkinson, said to him one day, “You coach just like a jazz musician!” Brooks replied, “You stupid ass, of course I coach like a jazz musician. And whether you realize it or not, that is the reason you can now make a decent living from running. Every goddamned time you win a race, you can thank Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ahmad Jamal.”
“I seemingly followed Brooks to Stanford,” remembers Warren Strudwick, who by then had become an orthopedic surgeon. “I was in residency and business school during his tenure. We stayed close through the years and when I finished my Sports Medicine fellowship, he paved the way for me to become physician for the Olympic Committee. Ultimately, we were on the staff of multiple international track and field events and at the ’96 Games in Atlanta.
“My involvement with those teams facilitated my selection as team orthopedist for the Raiders and Golden State Warriors. His influence has stretched across my life and career. And like many of our classmates we are proud and fortunate to have been in the presence of this extraordinary person. In a time of racial transition in this country, he provided an anchor for the African American and white kids alike. Teaching and educating in his inimitable way, he provided a powerful image that we could all grasp and hold onto as honest, tangible, and genuine.”
In all, Brooks coached at Stanford 13 years, until 1992. “I became a pain in the ass, got a divorce.” He moved to Cal Poly—San Luis Obispo. “It was frustrating,” he says.
The Straw Hat and Picasso
In 1996, Johnson moved back to Florida, where the Disney Corporation had created its Wide World of Sports Complex. The sports park was conceived and built by Reggie Williams, a 1976 Dartmouth graduate who had played 14 years as a linebacker with the Cincinnati Bengals.
Williams’ vision for the Disney sports park was for it to represent the best of sports at all levels. He also shared Johnson’s values about the importance of athletic and academic excellence.
At Lake Buena Vista, Brooks is known for his wide-brimmed straw hat, foldout chair, and his calm, no-nonsense demeanor as he coaches Olympic and national-level sprinters in what has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship.
David Oliver started training with Brooks after he graduated from Howard University in 2005. On Oliver’s first day of practice, “He threw up three times,” Brooks told Amy Shipley of The Washington Post, “and came back.”
Over the next few years, they refined Oliver’s technique, one detail at a time, As Shipley wrote, they never watched a single frame of video. Brooks wanted Oliver to execute by feel. Brooks even sent Oliver to a museum in Paris before an international meet to study Picasso’s works, explaining that the artist’s development from someone who expressed himself in complex images the learned to do so with simple ones was an evolution worth emulating.
Oliver won a bronze medal in the 110-meter hurdles at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Brooks was also the US relays coach.
“Coach Johnson is very special,” Oliver said to Dave Scheiber of the Tampa Bay Times. “First of all, he has a thorough knowledge of every event in track and field. He’s been around so long, knows exactly what to look for—what to do and not to do. But just on a personal basis, he’s taught me so much about life. I didn’t really get a great connection with my father, so he’s the first male who’s taught me and molded me to be a man and a professional athlete. He tells you everything straight up, no sugar coating. He’s elevated my career to heights I never thought were possible.”
In 2010, Oliver set an American record and Brooks, at 76, won the USA Track and Field Coach of the Year Award.
Around that time, George Haywood, who had started running in master’s track events, had an idea of competing in the demanding 400-meter hurdles. He mentioned this to Johnson, who said, “When you get serious about running, come down to Orlando and meet some of my friends who are working at a pretty high level.”
When George walked on the track, he saw Oliver, Olympic 100-meter gold medal winner Justin Gatlin, national champion long jumper/sprinter Tianna Madison Bartoletta, and national champion hurdler Tiffany Ross-Williams. Brooks said, “I told you we had some people working at a pretty high level.”
As a master’s runner, Haywood had his mind and capabilities expanded by training with Brooks, just as he had as a teenager, relearning the lesson that, “ ‘You don’t even know what your mental and physical limits are because you haven’t worked hard enough to know.’ Brooks still gets in your head and you can’t get him out of your head.”
Haywood won silver in the 400-meter hurdles at the 2011 World Championships.
“It’s the depth
and breadth and reach of the man,” said Haywood. “There are so many layers.”
An Evening of Appreciation
Several years ago, Haywood and 16 other Brooks protégés from St. Albans convened in Orlando to celebrate his legacy and impact. The weekend included a tour of the ESPN complex and an evening of toasts emceed by Bobby Clayton at Charley’s Steak House in Kissimmee, Florida.
Rick Hyde, class of 1971 and now a DC lawyer, said he thinks often of the Sphinx-like answer Brooks gave when he was posed with the quandary of whether to miss a baseball practice and be dismissed from the team in order to compete in the prestigious D.C. Metropolitan Schoolboy Championship Golf Tournament. St. Albans did not have a golf team in 1970, but Hyde signed up for the tournament and wanted a chance to compete against the D.C. metropolitan area's best.
"Brooks said, ' You gotta do what you gotta do.' He didn't tell me what to do. That would have been too easy. He made me evaluate it for myself but gave me the support I needed." Hyde made the right decision and shot a 68, which was the best score in the tournament, headlined in the Evening Star and Washington Post as "Hyde Plays Best." Hyde went on to have a distinguished golf career on the Princeton Varsity Golf Team, winning Varsity letters his junior and senior years.
Bob Wisdom, class of 1972 and now an actor, told a story from his career with NPR, when he went to Kingston, Jamaica, to do a documentary about Bob Marley. The Rastafarian gatekeepers were not inclined to let Wisdom in to do the interview. “I crossed my arms and stood the way Brooks used to, as if to communicate, ‘I’m a cool man.’ Marley looked over and said, ‘Let him in.’”
Bill Powers, class of 1975 and an entrepreneur, said, “Brooks had a way of coaching you not only for the short term but for the long term. He recalled asking Brooks how got an advantageous lane in a race that his times did not warrant. “He said, “I lie. Who’s gonna doubt me?’ He taught me to believe in myself.”
Tony Shapiro, also class of ’75, recalled a JV basketball game that erupted into an all-out brawl. He saw Brooks knocking people out with punches he’d learned as a champion boxer. “I decided I’m not going to mess with Brooks,” said Tony.
My classmate Warren Strudwick wasn’t there that evening in Florida, but her sent these words later: “Brooks was a mentor to many of us and served as a role model for some of us who were not track athletes. It was great to have him around, so that we could see a leader in such a relatively non-diverse environment that looked, walked, and talked like me as an African American kid.
“His value far surpassed his leadership in the Risk program and to the athletes at St Albans. He was a different type of educator that most of our schoolmates had never seen—mixing old school African American colloquialisms and aphorisms with practical knowledge gleaned from real world experience. For many in our class, it was the first time they had ever interacted with an African American male of authority. Given that the Civil Rights Act was still within throwing distance, this was powerful and more than just symbolic.
“His honesty was always accessible, rarely seen in the emotionally constrained environment of St Albans. And we all know that he was never afraid to speak his mind about any subject.”
George Goodrich, class of 1971, the previously mentioned Presbyterian pastor in Bozeman, Montana, recalled the turbulence of 1968. He invoked Hebrews 12:1-2 “Because we are summoned by so great a cloud of witnesses let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”
“What we had thanks to you, Brooks, was extremely special,” said George. “This nation was a mess with racial relations. You pulled us together by paying attention to each one of us. I know that a different kind of relationship was possible, that we could show the world that it could be different.”
George thanked Bobby Clayton for treating an unsure freshman as an equal. He also thanked fellow hurdler Larry Shipp.
On the morning of the IAC championships, when, a junior, and George, a senior, were the No. 1 and No. 2 hurdlers in the league, George noticed that Larry was not warming up for the hurdles. Since one of them was likely to win the event, St. Albans would get the points either way. “Brooks asked me not to,” said Larry. “This one’s yours.” said Shipp.
My classmate Neil
Langley, a longtime high school English teacher in Toronto, said it
all, in many ways, with his prose poem:
Brooks in the
Blood
I wanted to write you a poem, Brooks.
I mentioned this to my friend and he said,
“You can’t write a poem for a sports coach.”
“But you don’t know Brooks. He’d mix running, jazz, and
Watergate all together.
You don’t know what it’s like to have Brooks in the
blood.”
I told my love about this poem, and she asked, “What will
it say?” Well…
I’ll write about that time we were going to a meet at St.
Stephens School in Alexandria.
I had been in a running slump and on the bus ride over
there, Brooks said,
“Langley, if you don’t break 10:20 in the two-mile,
you’re walkin' home.”
Two-mile race time: 10 minutes: 24 seconds. So, we’re
piling back on the bus and Brooks looks at me and says, “You’re walkin'.”
“But Brooks, it’s 20 miles back to school,” somebody
said.
“Driver, let’s go.”
I don’t remember everything about that run back to St.
Albans, but I do remember getting stopped in the dark along Rock Creek Parkway
by a cop who ended up giving me a ride part way. The next day I asked my coach why he did
that.
“Langley, I wouldn’t even bother doing that with half the
guys on this team. But you’re close to
doing something and I’m trying anything I can to get you there.” What?! (I thought to myself) Now he’s trying
to make me feel special.
And then five weeks later, a little tenth grader
surprised some people and himself by winning gold in an upset two-mile run at
the IAC Championships,
a small accomplishment that skinny, shy young man put
quietly in his pocket for a lifetime.
Brooks in the blood.
I told my son I was writing my old coach a poem, and he
said, “Tell the swamp story.” About the
time we drove down to Florida to get a jump on spring training.
Brooks was at the wheel of the van, we were all asleep.
Then, a horn blast and "Outta the way, motherfucka!”
We’re all wide-eyed—to see this huge white egret flying
across the interstate through a Georgia swamp.
Brooks in the blood.
I asked a classmate about this poem, and we remembered
how Brooks invited
the comedian and philosopher Dick Gregory to speak to the
Upper School.
We gathered one spring day outside at the Amphitheatre to
have this brilliant man blow our minds with laughter and insight. I can never forget how he talked about the
secrets and lies of that famous DC insider, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Someone asked Gregory how he knew all this stuff.
“We know people who take out his garbage and he doesn’t
shred everything.” Snap—bringing
together power, secrecy, revelation, and that particular
African-American genius for cuttin' through the shit.
Then there was the story Brooks told about when he first
came to Washington in the 60s.
How he made a point of going out with friends to some
fine (segregated) DC restaurant
to be told they couldn't come in. "What'd you do?!" we'd ask. Then we'd listen and learn.
And then start to understand how neighborhoods in our
city were going up in flames in 1968.
Or how Brooks would say,
“It was just luck if you were born where you were and not
in SE Washington.
You have a responsibility to do something with your fluke
of good fortune.”
For some of us, that led to a lifelong passion for social
justice.
Another way you could get Brooks in your blood.
I told my family doctor about this poem, and he said,
“Mention the specialist.”
Last year I’d been having some chest pains, so Dr. Fred
sent me for those stress tests. There I
was on the hospital treadmill all hooked up with suction cups and wires.
Finally, the famed cardiologist comes in, glances quickly
at the monitor printouts, and asks, “Are you an athlete?”
“I was a runner a long time ago. “
“Well, you’ve got an athlete’s heart. Must be heartburn you’re complaining about.”
That is really having Brooks in the blood.
I asked his old friend Sam Hoffman about Brooks and
distance running.
“Barnyard physics.”
That’s how Brooks explained cross country.
Going downhill, use the earth’s gift of gravity. Going uphill, take small steps and lean
forward.
Build up your endurance.
Pace yourself over the length of the course,
and make sure you save something for the end.
Good advice for a running race. Good advice for living a life.
Good advice for sharing life on a planet.
Brooks, all of us in this room, and so many hundreds
more, have said these words:
“I had this track coach in high school…”
We all have stories, memories, and lessons engraved in
our bodies, in our hearts, and in our souls.
Lessons we lived and learned many decades ago because of
you.
And each one of us understands exactly what it means to
have
Brooks in the blood.
“It started with Canon Martin,” said Brooks, capping the evening. “It is still with Canon Martin. Because at the end of the day it was his vision and mission for the school that allowed all of us to grow and develop at St. Albans.”
In 2018 USA Track & Field named Brooks as its 2018 Legend Coach. “When I was introduced to the crowd at the National Outdoor Championships,” he wrote, “I wore an St. Albans 100-Year Campaign cap that Skip Grant gave me back in 2009. STA is never too far from anything I do.”
Brooks Johnson died on June 29, 2024, at 90, in Kissimmee, Florida.
