Word: kingsburg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...taught for 30 years in the high school and town of Kingsburg, Calif., which Rafer Johnson has now made famous, I am overjoyed at TIME'S recognition of this remarkably fine young man. However, lest one minor incident recounted in TIME'S story leave an unfair impression of the people of Kingsburg, may I testify that any drawing of a color line is most uncharacteristic of Kingsburgers generally. There Rafer has always been accepted on terms of his worth alone-as a responsible leader in grammar and high school, as an able and dignified president of the high...
...Lewis Johnson moved his growing family of three boys and two girls to California, where he caught on as a section hand for the Southern Pacific. The family ended up in the quiet town of Kingsburg (pop. 1,500), 20 miles south of Fresno in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. For a year, with nothing but a ragged curtain as a dividing "wall," the seven Johnsons made their home in a boxcar on a siding near a cannery...
...Decathlon Man." There never was any doubt that Rafer would be an athlete. "First thing I remember about Rafer," says Benton Bowen, co-publisher of the weekly Kingsburg Recorder, "was that my daughter came telling that the principal had asked the new boy to stop hitting the baseball so hard-he was breaking all the bats...
...high school athlete, Johnson became a legend. In football, he led Kingsburg to three league championships, as a granitic. 195-lb. left halfback averaged over 9 yds. per carry. In basketball, he averaged 17 points a game. In baseball, he hit over .400. But track was his sport-anything in track. In Johnson's junior year, Track Coach Murl Dodson drove him the 24 miles down to Tulare to watch Local Hero Bob Mathias compete in the event he had won as a 17-year-old in the 1948 Olympics in London and at Helsinki in 1952: the decathlon...
...late coach Red Sanders, who saw in Johnson a future brilliant tailback in U.C.L.A.'s single-wing formation. Freshman Johnson improved fast enough in the decathlon to win the 1955 Pan American Games in Mexico City, celebrated by scoring 7.985 points at a welcome-home meet in Kingsburg-thereby breaking Mathias' world record by 98 points...