After flying B-24s in World War II, Cecil Johnson found campus life at Georgia Tech to be a bit dull. In a 1998 interview with the Alumni Association’s Living History program, he recalled that he went through school constantly thinking he might transfer. But he liked his major courses in general engineering, and the discipline he learned through the military helped him stick it out.
Cecil Gray Johnson, who, despite being a less-than-enthusiastic Tech student, earned three degrees from the Institute and later spent 37 years teaching in its classrooms, died Oct. 25 at the age of 83. Professor Johnson, GE 48, IE 49, MS IE 57, retired as an industrial and systems engineering professor emeritus in 1992 but continued to teach, most recently at Worcester College of Oxford University in 2001. Throughout much of his career at Tech, he supplemented his professor’s salary with a job as a consultant with Delta Air Lines, spending one day a week for 35 years working with the airline.
Professor Johnson grew up in Nanafalia, Ala., the youngest of six children. His father died when he was just 6 years old. He studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Alabama before joining the Air Corps in 1943. He served as a lead B-24 pilot in the 8th Air Force, completing 20 combat missions over Germany.
He enrolled at Tech in 1945. He was a member of Alpha Pi Mu, ANAK, Omicron Delta Kappa and the Order of Omega; editor of the Technique; and president of Kappa Sigma fraternity and the General Engineering Society.
He was working with American Art Metals, manufacturing aluminum doors for banks, and in his spare time taking courses at Tech for a master’s degree when a fraternity brother asked him in 1955 to return to campus to teach a production control class. At the end of the first quarter, he asked his students what they thought he should do for a living. They thought he should teach. So he taught another quarter, and another, asking his students the same question at every quarter’s end.
“I had planned to stay there for a year and then go back to industry,” he said. “So for the next 35, 36 years I asked the question every quarter.” During his career, he also was editor in-chief of the Journal of Industrial Engineering for 10 years and served on the board of directors of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, from which he received the Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award in 1992. A Presidential Scholarship was established in his name at Georgia Tech that same year. Professor Johnson continued to perform research and write during retirement.
He wrote textbooks as well as a novel, a history of the Georgia Tech Executive Round Table and a collection of family anecdotes, which he told Living History he was writing because he was tired of retelling the same stories over and over.
Professor Johnson’s survivors include his daughter-in-law, Kim Johnson, MS ICS 87.
Twitter
Professor Johnson is one of the most fascinating people I ever met and I enrolled in his class on design of experiments for a quarter at GT. I doubt he would have remembered me but he encouraged me to study peoples’ (and other animals’) territorial behaviour and how it affected engineering testing and experiments.
Being a brit, I was fascinated with his story about his time in B24’s based in England. Apparently, the US airforce had a method of testing the bomb load of a B24. It seems that, when they first arrived, the bomb load was increased one bomb at a time. The pilots noticed the wing flex increasing more and more and when they asked what the limit was (as they’d well execeeded the manufacturers stated limit already), they were told to follow orders and fly. Eventually, the wings were flexing almost vertically and faced with protests from the aircrews, someone whispered to them that when a bomber broke a wing on take off, the bomb load would be that - minus one bomb ! He swore to me that this is a true story. He told me not to do my engineering testing using this method !
He was a real gentleman and always had time to chat and have a chuckle and was a true war hero whom I admired greatly. I will always remember him.
Mark Duffin Class of 91.