Bert Johnston discovered his pleasure in writing as a fourth grader, when several of his poems were published in the Wheeling Intelligencer. It was the beginning of a lifetime of writing in a variety of genres. During high school he was editor of the weekly Charleston High School Book Strap, with ambitions to become a newspaper journalist. During wartime service in the U.S. Navy, he felt called to the ministry and turned his vocational interest from journalism to the writing of sermons. Now retired, many sermons later, he has turned his interest to fiction. Parson Campbell's Breakthrough is his first published novel. He is currently writing a second one. Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, Bert and his twin brother Bob spent their boyhood years in Wheeling and attended high school in Charleston, West Virginia. He earned his A.B. degree, magna cum laude, from Centre College of Kentucky, where he was the only non-English major invited to membership in Obiter Scripta, a student writers group. His forte in that group was the writing of humorous essays. He went on to study theology at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. Mr. Johnston has served churches in Victoria and Kenbridge, Virginia (a joint field), in Charleston, West Virginia, and in Paris and Morehead, Kentucky. In 1974 he became his denomination's Regional Communicator in a synod of fifteen presbyteries in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky, and then moved to the Presbytery of Florida, where he served as presbytery executive for ten years. Before retirement, he went back to parish ministry, serving interim ministries in Memphis, Tennessee, Lincoln, Nebraska, and Annapolis, Maryland. In 1953 Bert married Betty Wooddell of Charleston, West Virginia. The Johnstons have three sons, two daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren. They have traveled in Canada, the British Isles, France, Switzerland and the Caribbean. Bert has also studied in Belgium and has made church-related trips to Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The Johnstons live at Westminster Village in Spanish Fort, Alabama, where the five rivers of the Tensaw Delta become the beautiful Mobile Bay. |
About Bert |