Larry Johnson
By Jeff Elder

The walls of Larry Johnson’s small office at the Prince George Forest District are loaded with plaques and certificates recognizing his 35 years of service and volunteer work. His six-foot-four-inch frame and size-13 shoes fill the office too, but they’re offset by an easy-going smile and a laugh that punctuates his candid stories. Larry is well-known to staff as an experienced Field Operations Supervisor, trainer, former member of the BCGEU provincial executive, and a person you can talk to when things are going sideways.

His career in the Forest Service began in 1965 after a forest ranger visited his high school in Dawson Creek. "The job had some romanticism to it—in small town B.C., if you were a forest ranger you weren’t God, but next to it," Larry said in an interview.

After several years on cruising and time-study crews—in the days when the Forest Service did that kind of work in-house—Larry became an assistant ranger in the Dawson Creek district in 1970.

"I had the whole south half of the district to myself, with little experience. My wife Gloria, my daughter Jo-anne and I lived at this isolated lake in a Forest Service house with a well, a boathouse and a diesel electric generator. You had to know how to use it all. Gloria had to put up with a wood cook-stove. But it was fun."

As Larry describes it, the work was much less complex then in his position, which was for the summer only. "I had two bush mills to look after. There couldn’t have been more than 10 or 15 hectares a season of harvesting. The big job was fire suppression. I survived the summer, two fires, one that got away on me, and getting reamed out by the district ranger. He had a tough reputation, but we got along okay."

That fall, Larry and his family moved to Quesnel. "In those days you didn’t get a choice—you just went where you were told. A regional office employee came up with a truck and trailer at the end of the season, backed it up to the door, helped you load your stuff and away you went!"

A son, Keith, arrived some time later. Then, after more moves around the Central Interior, Larry ended up at the Prince George district office where he’s spent the past eleven years.

"During my first 18 years nothing changed—people stayed in the same spot, the structure was the same, the legislation changed only slightly. Then bang—we had a new Forest Act, new Ministry of Forests Act, new structure, downsizing, the bottom dropped out of your safe civil service career. We were all scrambling."

Fortunately, Larry had enough seniority and experience to hang on and later win his Field Operations Supervisor position, something he did with the encouragement of his Operations Manager at the time, Del Blackstock.

Larry counts among his career highlights his stint representing the BCGEU, along with the job satisfaction he felt during those earlier, simpler times. After his last day in March, he has a year to wait until Gloria retires and then they plan to take up residence on Vancouver Island to be closer to their grandchildren.