GILSUM — When there was a fire, he was among the first on scene. When the fire trucks broke, he fixed them. When someone went off the road, he was the one who came and towed them.
Once, when the Hammond Hollow bridge washed out, he took his truck out on the backroads on Sunday morning to give stranded people a ride to church. That story sums up longtime Fire Chief William “Bill” Johnson, the town’s current Chief Dee Denehy said, but it’s only one among dozens.
“Everybody knew who he was and had probably had a positive interaction with him at some point,” Denehy said. “You could call anyone in Gilsum and they would have a story.”
For decades, when something went wrong in Gilsum, Johnson was the first to raise his hand to help. Even at 85, he would be one of the first to respond when the fire department’s call came over the scanner, his daughter Carrie Johnson said. His death last month left a tear in the fabric of the community — and a shining legacy of service.
He served the town in many ways, officially and unofficially. Johnson put in 72 years with the fire department, including 25 as chief. He was director of emergency management and fire warden for 50 years and served as road agent.
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The Bill behind Bill’s Garage, he was also a talented mechanic and donated his labor to repair town vehicles. And when the town’s annual Rock Swap got started in 1964, he leapt in to the effort with both feet, offering rides out to local mines and lending the town his land to park cars on.
Johnson would often remind the fire department’s volunteer members that their primary role was service, even when a request wasn’t exactly in their job description. “One of his things was that the equipment and the fire trucks — they weren’t ours, they were the town’s. So if somebody needed something, we should try to help them,” Denehy said.
Johnson was as Gilsum as they come. Born in town, he lived there his entire life other than his years in the U.S. Army. “He hardly ever wanted to leave,” Carrie, who now lives in Keene, said.
She described her father as a family-oriented man and dedicated civil servant with a strong sense of community and an irrepressible instinct to help. She and her brother Christopher “are ridiculously lucky to have had him as a father,” she said.
For Denehy, Johnson was like the whole town’s dad — and an inspiration to the next generation.
“As soon as I met him, I said, ‘When I grow up, that’s who I want to be,’ ” Denehy recalled.
Johnson’s family has asked donations in his memory to be sent to the Gilsum Fire Department.
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