Anne Beckwith Johnson

Anne Beckwith (Miller) Johnson (August 27, 1924 - December 19, 2013) was an author, wife, mother, and community activist. With her husband, Vernon O. Johnson and their eight children, she managed a 20-month, international good-will journey around the world during the height of the Cold War in 1960-1961. Her book, Home Is Where The Bus Is, was published a week before the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers. The timing was unfortunate for a book on breaking barriers to world diplomacy through face-to-face interaction. In 1960 the concept of pulling eight children from school to travel the world on a good-will mission in an aging 1947 bus, across the US, Europe, and into Russia, in an era when fear of Communism in the United States was at its height, was considered unconscionable. The trip was the result of Vernon Johnson meeting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the Santa Barbara train station, and telling the leader that he would bring his family to Russia. The 20-month trip was an epic journey documented by countless newspapers and magazines worldwide. Vernon's relentless endeavors to circumnavigate the world by crossing Siberia to get to Japan, resulted in the Soviet authorities relenting in allowing the Johnson family to become the first tourists since WWI to travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Early life
Anne Beckwith Miller was born in Riverside, California into the heart of the Mission Inn Miller Family in 1924, and spent her formative years in the Mission Inn. A member of her father's Miller bloodline, Elder William Brewster, arrived on the Mayflower and became a central figure and religious leader in Plymouth. Her mother's Beckwith bloodline line can be traced back over 1,000 years to King Henry the second in the 12th century.
During elementary school years Johnson skipped two grades, despite attending 7 different schools before she graduated due to employment pressures on her father. She spent her last three years in Twentynine Palms, California attending the local high school where she excelled in writing and Spanish language and graduated at age 16. Johnson came to Santa Barbara in September 1941 at age 17, to attend Santa Barbara State College (now University of California, Santa Barbara). She married Vernon O. Johnson on March 16, five months later. Early letters, over 1000 between them during the war years, reveal a reserved, pragmatic, and supportive Johnson and a driven, philosophical, and passionate Vernon, a balance of personalities that would result in eight children and a successful partnership in international Cold War travel and good-will diplomacy. He had ideas; she would execute.
WWII and military life
A week after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, Vernon proposed to her. They married in March 1942. Following June graduation Vernon enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was called up in February, a week before child #1 was born. During this time many of his letters to her employed her to keep learning, children notwithstanding; not to be a boring housewife. She continued to learn, but always regretted never getting a formal education.
Over a two-month period in Autumn of 1945, child #2 was born, Johnson's mother died, and Vernon's airplane crashed on a bombing run in Italy killing most of his crew. He lost a leg and spent much of the next three years in and out of hospitals for multiple procedures.
Post-war life
In 1947 child #3 was born. They spent the next year in Phoenix as Vernon studied economics and political science at the American Institute of Foreign Trade School (now Thunderbird School of Global Management). He was on his way to becoming a diplomat. At the end of training, Vernon was accepted to graduate school in Colombia, but by the time they were formalizing plans, child #4 changed the plans. After her birth he was accepted in a graduate program at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico to study economics, foreign affairs, and law. Johnson and the four children went with him.
Soon after their return from Mexico, child #5 was born. Thereafter, on a two-year interval until 1957, child #6, #7, and #8 were born. In 1952, they bought an acre and a half on Hot Springs Road that included garages, pump house, green houses, servant quarters subdivided from an adjacent grand estate. Three years later Vernon bought tons of adobe bricks and with Johnson and the kids mixed endless wheelbarrows of cement constructing walls to close a four-car garage into a formal living room. The house was recently advertised as an 1800s adobe, commanding high prices.
In 1958, with eight children, Johnson became President of the PTA of Montecito Union School. Decades later another parent confided that she had turned down the position because she had two kids at home. Johnson figured with at least four attending the school, she owed something.
In 1960, Johnson and Vernon took off for two years with eight children ranging in age from 2 to 17, in a 1947 Ford bus camping for most of the journey as they circumnavigated the globe. Vernon's driving philosophy was that "There's no such thing as a problem," a statement that haunted his wife. Johnson wrote about it in her book, Home is Where The Bus Is, which was based on hundreds of pages of neatly typed letters written throughout the trip and saved by friends. A letter written to family reads: ”I just finished your mother's memoirs of the big trip. It has everything! All the old-fashioned “values”. But more than all—otto bambini, mamma mia—is how absolutely great your mother is. Your father, too. I mean, without love, that bus had to be somebody's idea of a nightmare. No wonder your father kept looking at the Big Picture. And your mother must have truly and deeply loved your father.
After the trip Johnson tried began writing a trip memoir, but the journalist/editor who was assisting her kept editing out what he considered unsavory parts by 1962 standards. For example, she couldn't say that she and her children stayed two weeks in a brothel in Verona, Italy (the only establishment that would accept eight children) while Vernon took a train to Amsterdam to pick up the bus which was shipped on a different ship than the one that carried the family from New York to Venice, Italy. She put writing aside for 30 years.
When her husband, Vernon, ran for Congress in 1962 Johnson helped. In 1963 Vernon bought the Oaks Hotel in Ojai. Johnson again threw herself into it, but couldn't keep it from bankruptcy. They lost everything they owned. Vernon stopped working and became the stay-at-home dad.
In 1965 Anne Johnson applied for work at a temp agency. With eight children she had abundant management skills and she typed quickly. She moved up through jobs and companies. She eventually became the Vice President of Quad Group, a high-tech spin off of Sloan Corporation.
Johnson retired at age 62 and turned back to writing about The Trip. Vernon read the first chapters and exclaimed that she didn't get "The Big Picture"; she wrote about laundry, shopping and bus breakdowns. She stopped writing. He never wrote his own book. Vernon died in 1987.
Over the next decade Johnson became a docent at the Museum of Natural History, was elected president of Friends of the Santa Barbara Library as well as being on the S. B. Advisory Committee and the Adult Education Advisory Council, on the board of directors of the Unitarian Church, and chaired an annual Planned Parenthood fundraising event.
She took an adult education writing class began writing articles published in local newspapers and national journals.
With new-found confidence, she returned to her memoir documenting the 1960-1961 world trip. When her teachor/mentor passed away she began teaching his Adult Education writing class and continued to write on her own. She had hundreds of pages of letters and diaries from which to keep the facts alive. She published it a week before 9/11 bombing. Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay It Forward wrote, "“A charming read, full of warm humor and humanity, very rich and enlightening. It's the sort of book you put down but don't forget. The discoveries of this remarkable (and may I say not at all times enviable) journey become part of the reader's experience as well.” The timing of publication was unfortunate, as it was a story about breaking down barriers to world peace.
In 1998 she led a writing workshop on How to Write Your Own Obituary. Though she didn't write her own obituary, she clipped this quote from George Bernard Shaw that reflects her life for her memorial:
“I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It ia a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations.”

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