It’s a long way from Mr. Melvin’s Music and History classes and Doc Mosby’s Industrial Arts classes to the Las Vegas Strip, but one of their students managed to make the trek and thrive in the hectic atmosphere of Stars and Show Girls.

        The Spring class of 1946 has more than their share of accomplished students. But one of their classmates, David Johnsen S46, made the positive move and has managed to succeed big time.While at Lincoln, David states he wasn’t much interested in sports and elected to join the ROTC and the band. He loved music and played the trumpet as well as the melaphone and the violin. But devilment did not escape this Mustang. He says of his delinquent escapades: “....a couple of timebombs in the El Rey Theatre... they were set with alarm clocks and chained underneath the seats of the theatre. They caused quite a sensation.” He continues, “I also had a model A roadster with no fenders. It was fun to drive close to the curb, when it rained, and splash everybody.”Quite a lover of practical jokes, David once threw a giant firecracker into a neighbors garage. David says, “Now, this firecracker was wrapped with about an inch of colored paper. When this thing went off, there must have been 10,000 pieces of colored paper in their basement. Now, Bob Elder had lovely parents and it took me about a month to clean up all that paper.”

        David remembers his good friends at Lincoln as; Bill Davis, Harry Thompson, Ed Erpenstein, Bob VonKosky and Joe Laval.

        In Las Vegas, Don landed the job as stage manager at the Tropicana and worked with such notables as: Eddie Fisher, Spike Jones, Jayne Mansfield, Joe E. Brown, Carol Channing, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Yvonne DeCarlo and many others. He also worked on several motion pictures that included actors Maurice Chevalier, Elvis Presley and others.After the Folies Bergere, where David produced and his wife Kerstin appeared, David went to the Circus Circus as Assistant Producer and opened that casino in Las Vegas. He then became Executive Producer and controlled the productions.

        Sometime during that era he found time to travel to Nashville to do a stint with Johnny Cash and even co-produced his television show “Johnny Cash at the Circus.”

        From the Statesman Journal: “David Johnsen and his wife, Kerstin, traveled from Florence to attend Sunday’s Spruce Goose gala, titled an ‘Evening with Howard and Oscar.’ Johnsen made sure the guests weren’t disappointed by dressing up as the tycoon, complete with a 1970’s-vintage rust-colored leisure suit, a fedora, sunglasses and white tennis shoes. He even shaved his beard down to a pencil-thin strip of whiskers”.

        The article continued, “David is convinced that one time he spotted the reclusive billionaire (Hughes) walking along the Desert Inn Golf Course at 4 a.m.. David says ‘I think it was him, I’m positive it was him. Who else would it be?’”

        David says of his vocation, “Basically, it was a wonderful job. I could have as many as 24 different nationalities working together in the show. I had 10 departments and 150-200 people to coordinate in the Folies Bergere. One of my proudest moments was when it appeared that opening night would be total chaos. The artistic Director, who was from the Folies Bergere in Paris, was beside himself. I was calling the show and it went off without a hitch. He stood there stunned and all he could say was ‘miracle,miracle, miracle.’ It was a life filled with emotion. And then I went to Circus Circus and worked with circus acts. This was another world. Circus folks are in a little world all their own, high emotions there too. I had a great flying act that would try for the impossible. It was a quad, that is 4 somersaults and then being caught in midair. When they knew it was going to be attempted, all the other circus acts would come out to watch. The quad never happened.

        We were filming the James Bond movie Diamonds are Forever and the director got so excited watching the flying acts through the net over the crap tables that he grabbed a hand-held camera and ran underneath the net to film the action himself.”

        While all this may seem a bit bizaare to us laymen, special people like David Johnson make it happen, for us, for show biz and for posterity.

        David says of Lincoln, “I still remember that first day. I hiked up the hill to Lincoln and it was all shrouded in fog. You could just see the rebar sticking out of the ends of that unfinished lonely building that we learned to love.”

        We ALL had an experience like that David, we just can’t say it so eloquently.