David A. Johnston

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David A. Johnston : biography

18 December 1949 – 18 May 1980

There are several public memorials where Johnston’s name is inscribed in a list of those known to have died in the eruption. These memorials include a large curved granite monument at an outside viewing area at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, which opened in 1997, and a plaque at the Hoffstadt Bluffs Visitor Center, which was unveiled in a memorial grove in May 2000.

Depictions

There have been several tellings of Johnston’s story in documentaries, films and docudramas about the eruption. Documentaries such as The Eruption of Mount St. Helens! (1980) appeared the same year, while a movie was filmed in the year following the eruption and released to coincide with the first anniversary. The story of Mount St. Helens and Johnston continues to be told in documentaries and reconstructions several decades after the eruption took place.

In the 1981 film St. Helens, actor David Huffman starred as a renamed Johnston (David Jackson). Controversially, Huffman’s character became involved in a love affair and was killed by the blast while on top of the mountain. Johnston’s parents criticized the production of the film, arguing that it possessed not "an ounce of David in it" and portrayed "him as a daredevil rather than a careful scientist". They threatened to sue over the fact that they felt their son’s memory had been contaminated. Johnston’s mother stated that the film had changed many true aspects of the eruption, and depicted her son as "a rebel" with "a history of disciplinary trouble".

Prior to the film’s release during the one-year anniversary of the eruption, 36 scientists who knew Johnston signed a letter of protest. They wrote that, "Dave’s life was too meritorious to require fictional embellishments," and that, "Dave was a superbly conscientious and creative scientist."Parchman, p. 206. Don Swanson, a USGS geologist who was Johnston’s friend and who, due to other commitments, had convinced Johnston to take his place at the Coldwater II observation post on the day of the eruption,Parchman, pp. 21–22. believed that a movie based on Johnston’s true life and exploits would have been a hit because of his friend’s character.

Several documentaries and docudramas have covered the history of the eruption, including archive footage and dramatisations of Johnston’s story. These include Up From the Ashes (1990) by KOMO-TV, an episode of the 2005 second series of Seconds From Disaster broadcast by the National Geographic Channel, and an episode of the 2006 series Surviving Disaster, broadcast on the BBC and Discovery Channel.

Major publications

Life and career

Johnston was born at the University of Chicago Hospital on December 18, 1949, to Thomas and Alice Johnston. They originally lived in Hometown, Illinois, but moved to Oak Lawn shortly after Johnston’s birth. Johnston grew up with one sister. His father worked as an engineer at a local company and his mother as a newspaper editor. Johnston often took photographs for his mother’s newspaper and contributed articles to his school’s newspaper. He never married.

After graduating from high school, Johnston attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He planned to study journalism, but became discouraged after a poor grade in a large lecture class. He was intrigued by an introductory geology class, and changed his major. His first geologic project was a study of the Precambrian rock that forms Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There he investigated the remains of an ancient volcano: a suite of metamorphosed basalts, a gabbroic sill, and volcanic roots in the form of a dioritic and gabbroic intrusion. The experience planted the seed of Johnston’s passion for volcanoes. After working hard to learn the subject, he graduated with "Highest Honors and Distinction" in 1971.

Johnston spent the summer after college in the San Juan volcanic field of Colorado working with volcanologist Pete Lipman in his study of two extinct calderas. This work became the inspiration for the first phase of his graduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle, in which he focused on the Oligocene Cimarron andesitic volcanic complex in the western San Juans. Johnston’s reconstruction of the eruptive history of the extinct volcanoes prepared him to study active volcanoes. Johnston’s first experience with active volcanoes was a geophysical survey of Mount Augustine in Alaska in 1975. When Mount Augustine erupted in 1976, Johnston raced back to Alaska, shunting his former work on the Cimmaron Volcano into a master’s thesis, and making Mount Augustine the focus of his Ph.D. work. He graduated in 1978 with his Ph.D., having shown that (1) the emplacement mechanism of the pyroclastic flows had changed over time, as they became less pumaceous, (2) the magmas contained high quantities of volatile water, chlorine, and sulfur, and (3) underground mixing of the felsic (silicic) magmas with less-viscous mafic (basaltic) magmas could have triggered eruptions. Mount Augustine was also the site of an early near-disaster for Johnston, when he became trapped on the mountain during an eruption after high winds grounded the first two evacuation aircraft.