David C. Johnson was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. He went to radio broadcast school while still in high school. During the Korean War he joined the Coast Guard. After completing an electronics-training program he served on the cutter Bearing Sea as an electronic technician and later at a South Pacific Loran station as a transmitter operator and electronic tech.

After the war he studied at Pacific Lutheran College and then University of Washington in Seattle Eng. school.

He went to work for Boeing while still in college first as a radar test tech then as Liaison Planner and tool and production planner on the B52 and the 707.

In 1958 he moved to the Boeing physical research staff developing a flight guidance system for the Dyna-Soar, which was a manned spacecraft that was later canceled.

He then went to work for Martin Murrieta as a field service engineer working at Ft. Lawton in Seattle on the startup of an anti aircraft missile control system.

In 1961 he joined Boeing Scientific Research Lab with the cosmic ray research group designing and building test equipment used to determine if man could survive the radiation outside of earth's atmosphere or on the surface of the moon.

He moved to California in 1965 and went to work for Douglas Advanced Research Lab continuing the cosmic ray research.

Moving to Royal Industries, he was a manufacturing engineer for aircraft parts production and also developed and built a flight test flutter system for the Lockheed L1011 aircraft.

At Electron Research, an electron beam-welding machine builder, he designed the control system for the electron beam-welding machine that was used to weld the main rocket engines for the space shuttle.

At that point there was no new space research, so he turned his considerable experience in control systems to manufacturing applications. He was active in the glass coating industry, the particulate recovery for a coal fired power plant and he worked on the control system for a medical instrument and supply company.

Mr. Johnson now enjoys an active retirement in southern California, tending his fruit trees and vegetable garden.