Red Springs legends

In the early hours of Dec. 16, 1943, doctors from Red Springs, N.C., raced to an overpass near Rennert, where North Carolina’s deadliest train wreck had just occurred. They were joined by medical personnel from across the region attempting to rescue and treat as many as possible.

Working alongside the doctors was 15-year-old Charles Johnson Jr., son of Dr. Charles Johnson Sr., one of Red Springs’ four resident physicians. Had there been time to notice a teenager in their midst, nobody would have been concerned. They knew young Charles from earliest childhood to be at his father’s side in the office, on house calls and around town.

“It was a terrible night,” he recalls. “It was so cold the syringes froze.” Many of the 72 dead were servicemen traveling home for the holidays.

For Charles Jr., the memory of that horrific emergency blends with countless other calls his father took at all hours. “Dad worked seven days a week. It was taken for granted that he would come when called,” and often the son went too. This is a prevailing memory and one of several stories Charles and his wife Dare shared of their lives in the small town of Red Springs.

Born in 1928 in the family home on Red Springs’ South Main Street, Johnson took his place in the community naturally, attending public schools, pitching in with chores and helping Dad on the job. “There was nothing unusual about it,” he recalled. “It was just taken for granted.”

“Dad was raised on a farm and for many years we kept two cows, chickens and a garden.” It fell to Charles, the oldest son and second oldest of four children, to milk the cows and clean the chicken house every Saturday morning. “We used the manure in mother’s prize rose garden,” he said. “We used everything. It’s true that kids used dried cow paddies to mark bases for ball games.”

As he grew older, he passed some household chores to his siblings and took “real” jobs at Garret-McNeill Grocery, Graham’s department store and Red Springs Drugs.

During those years, Red Springs’ four doctors — Henry H. Hodgen, Sr., John Bender, Roscoe McMillian and Charles Johnson Sr. — stayed busy in a town that flourished with mills, a strong agricultural base and Flora Macdonald College.

World War II demanded that Johnson rethink his education. He left Red Springs High School in grade 10 and entered Wake Forest University having first passed required exams. After a semester, he transferred to Duke, earning his bacholor’s degree in 1948.

At Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where his father had studied, he earned his doctorate in 1953. A one-year internship at Raleigh’s Rex Hospital in 1954 was followed by two years as a captain in the Air Force, serving as medical officer and base surgeon at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where he received the Commendation Ribbon for Meritorious Service and then on to a one-year residency at the Medical College of Virginia.

In Richmond, friends Becky and Dave Hill introduced him to Virginia Dare Peace. The relationship began with Johnson asking three important questions: Did she have a car, an apartment, and a blender? The answers were yes, yes, and yes, although she later admitted to running out to buy a blender.

Dare Peace grew up in rural New Kent, a small community east of Richmond, the only child of a farmer father and schoolteacher mother. Valedictorian in 1952, she attended Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Va., for two years before transferring to UNC Chapel Hill to study the new field of medical technology, graduating in 1956. By the second half of that year, she too was at the Medical College of Virginia, earning a second bachelor’s degree in 1957.

The romance flourished despite heavy work and study schedules. In July 1957, Johnson returned to Red Springs to join his father in practice, but only a few months later returned to Richmond to propose. With little time for wedding preparations, the senior Johnsons gave the young couple a house on East Third Avenue and Johnson headed for Conway, S.C. with his friend Glenn Overton, who had a friend who owned a furniture store. Johnson drove home with a truck full of furniture, none of which Dare saw until after it was in the house.

Meanwhile, with help from family, Dare planned a Dec. 27 wedding at Broad Street Methodist Church in Richmond and a reception at the Jefferson Hotel. Because Duke was playing in the Orange Bowl in Miami that year, the newlyweds honeymooned in Florida.

The pace at which Charles and Dare managed their busy pre-marriage lives set the tempo for the life that followed.

Red Springs in 1958 was the quintessential southern small town. For the doctor’s new bride, life meant establishing membership in virtually every community organization, most of which promoted activities that contributed to the town’s well-being.

Dare’s mother-in-law, Myrtis Elise Dukes Johnson, daughter of a Methodist minister and an active participant in the town’s life, introduced her daughter-in-law at each meeting and to neighbors Isabelle Buie, Nan Bullock and Helen Buie, “who knew everyone and everything” in Red Springs.

“Mrs. Johnson hosted a reception for me,” says Dare, who remembers Red Springs as a very social town with frequent parties and dinners. “Everyone was very welcoming. I felt like I belonged here,” she said. “I wasn’t here any time at all before I was busy with projects and met many people.”

Most of the organizations and clubs that Dare joined in 1958 she continues in today, and typically she has held their various offices several times over. A few are the Robeson County Medical Auxiliary, Red Springs Garden Club, Dilettante Book Club, Robeson County Cotillion and the circles of Red Springs Presbyterian Church.

She also kept house and helped a husband who worked seven days a week, including Sunday afternoons. After church and Sunday lunch at the senior Johnsons’ home, the two doctors went to the office for whatever length of time was required.

Johnson had fallen into step with his father, accepting patients with varied needs and a wide range of payment plans, including hams, possum stews and freshly harvested vegetables. The practice served everyone, regardless of race or age, although the separation of waiting rooms for white and non-white patients continued when Charles joined his father. But, he emphasized, “We made house calls to all patients.”

With two Dr. Charles Johnsons on staff, some differentiation was called for. “Patients usually referred to us as Old Dr. Johnson and Young Dr. Johnson,” he explained, adding that nurse Emma Breeden settled on calling his father “the real Dr. Johnson.”

In April 1959 the young family welcomed daughter Elise (now Virginia Elise Johnson McMillan). Busy as usual, Johnson took Dare to the Lumberton hospital, dropped her off and raced to Scotland County to deliver a baby before returning to Lumberton to meet his new daughter. Her birth strengthened his commitment to the town, and he registered to run for the Red Springs Board of Education that very day.