WAYNE D. JOHNSON
1932-2021
Wayne D. Johnson, age 88, an attorney and public utility executive, died in February.
Born in Iowa in 1932, Wayne grew up in a small town in South Dakota where he developed two of his life-long interests — fishing and bird hunting. After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1954, he was drafted into the Army ultimately serving in a counter-intelligence unit in Germany until his discharge in 1956. Though never a fan of military life, as time passed, he would admit that he had learned more about people during those two years than during any other period of his life. Following the Army, he attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1959 and joining a Chicago law firm that represented telephone and natural gas utilities.
In 1975 he moved to Houston with his family to accept a position as general counsel and senior vice president at Entex, the local gas utility. Rising to president in 1978, he would remain with Entex another eight years before the first of three retirements. Not good at sitting idle, he was recruited by Occidental Petroleum the following year to run a pipeline subsidiary until his second retirement in 1992. Afterwards, with a vision ahead of its time, he began the start-up company American Natural Gas Power with the support of several Houston area companies to retrofit fleet vehicles to burn cheaper, cleaner natural gas. While they had some success retrofitting local fleet vehicles and demonstrated their technology in a field experiment in China, the company always struggled financially and closed in 1997 leading to his final retirement. He would continue his affiliation with the natural gas industry until 2011 when he finished 30 years of service as an outside Director of Simmons & Company International, a local investment banking firm.
Of the local civic organizations for which he volunteered, the one of which he was most proud was his service on the Board of the Sam Houston Area Council of the Boy Scouts. Becoming an Eagle Scout himself in 1949, he saw scouting as a formative experience in his life and wanted to provide those same opportunities to local area scouts.
Pre-deceased by his wife Lynne, Wayne is survived by his two sons.