[Merkle923]

Here he is with the Expos.

The Expos yearbook I alluded to earlier showing him in the last three weeks of his career turned out to be from 1982 and I stumbled over it on a shelf this weekend. It's got a fold-out poster of everybody who had played for Montreal to that point - thumbnails, arrayed in alphabetical order.

The first B&W version is to give an idea of scale (each photo may be an inch-and-a-half square, maybe less). The second is the original, isolated. The third was cleaned up by my friend, the Rembrandt of Photo-Shop, Bob Wong. He did the colorization too, and the final touch on these last two is a dip in the Remini machine, which really finished the job nicely for once.

As near as I can tell this is a legit original Expos photo of Johnson. He seems to be wearing number 30 (his longtime number and the one he had in Montreal). The Cubs had released him on Day 2 of the 1970 season, he signed with the Expos the same day and 20 days and three games later, he was released again. That ended a professional career that had begun when he signed with the Philadelphia A's in 1952 but stretched back even earlier to the '40s when as a boy he had worked Spring Training games for Connie Mack, either as a batboy, clubhouse kid, or scorecard hawker (the stories vary).