Engineer, 86, a frequent visitor at Las Vegas construction expo since 1957
Dressed in yellow sport coat, yellow dress shirt, light yellow pants, bright yellow socks and sunglasses, the garrulous Jim Johnson, 86, comes across as an eccentric fashion designer.
“I went to two Wal-Marts, two Targets and several other stores and could not find any yellow laces. This was the closest I could find,” he says, while sitting on a scooter, about the neon green laces he uses to tie his sneakers.
Between his sneakers, on the floor of his scooter, are five McDonald’s coffee cups in a takeaway holder. Four are for coffee and one to hold sugar. He drinks about five sweet cups of coffee a day, he says.
The yellow outfit is what makes the career cement plant engineer immediately recognizable among the 130,000 attendees at CONEXPO-CON/AGG, the largest construction industry gathering globally.
“I have people coming up to me and tapping me on the shoulder that I haven’t seen in 10 to 15 years because they recognized the yellow outfit,” he says.
Born on February 8, 1931, to a Wisconsin electrician who nearly lived to 100, Johnson knows the event inside out. He attended his first CONEXPO-CON/AGG — which then was called The Road Show — in Chicago in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower was still in the White House and the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn.
About 130,000 people are attending the trade show underway in Las Vegas. The show, which is closed to the public, runs through Saturday.
Johnson then was representing C. S. Johnson Co., a concrete plant designer and manufacturer that worked on many hydroelectric projects, including the Hoover Dam.
He remembers the 1957 show well. Johnson was awakened one morning in his fifth-floor hotel room in Chicago to screams and sirens. When he looked outside the window, he realized there was a fire on the ninth floor.
While concrete ingredients haven’t changed that much since 1957 — it’s still pretty much the same mix of cement, sand, rock and water — the show certainly has. From a few hundred exhibitors to a few thousand, including IT solution providers and drone makers, the show has grown in size and now covers 2.5 million square feet.
“The show is humongous,” Johnson exclaimed when asked about the difference between this year’s CONEXPO-CON/AGG and previous ones. “I used to walk about three-quarters of a mile to get to the show from Circus Circus. Now it’s right next to the hotel.”
The size of the show is why he chooses to get around on a scooter.
Johnson said he always stays at Circus Circus. If he gets free time, he goes over to Fremont Street, where he likes to watch other people play while he drops coins in slot machines.
“The fun is in getting to pull the lever,” he says about the old-fashioned coin-operated machines.
Now living in Georgia, Johnson continues to work as a consultant, advising people on new plants or upgrading old ones. Last year, he helped a North Dakota business restart production at a mixed-cement plant that had been idle for four years. He is currently advising on three new projects.
“I tell people I work 22/7 because I need at least two hours of sleep,” he said.
Before he departs on his scooter, which has a handmade yellow sign reading 1957-2017 waving in the air like a flag, he hands a reporter his business card: a yellow piece of paper with a sketch of a concrete mixing plant.
Contact Todd Prince at tprince@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0386. Follow @toddprincetv on Twitter.
