Word: kingsburg
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...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...
...Negro got a brotherly buss from the loser and a tremendous roar of approval from the 30,000 fans, as he mounted the winner's platform in Moscow's Lenin Stadium and smilingly held a bouquet of flowers aloft in triumph. Rafer Lewis Johnson, 22, of Kingsburg, Calif, had treated appreciative Muscovites to one of the greatest individual performances in track and field history. He had amassed a world-record 8,302 points in the rugged decathlon*—:considered by many the toughest test of human endurance ever devised in sport. Russian men and women edged...
Back home in Kingsburg (pop. 23,000), Rafe's parents smiled happily when the local radio station interrupted a music program to announce his victory. But none of the town's inhabitants were very surprised. To the home-town folks, Johnson is a Samson, Paul Bunyan and Frank Merriwell rolled into one. His smoothly muscled build (6 ft. 3 in., 200 Ibs.) casts him in the mold of Jim Thorpe and Bob Mathias, great Olympic decathlon champions of the past. In high school he captained the track, basketball and football teams, is still remembered as a good infielder...