George A. Johnson ’59

George, the nation’s first Peace Corps volunteer, died Nov. 20, 2022. 

He came to Princeton “a poor but honest jock” from Titusville (Pa.) High School, where he had played football, basketball, and track, and was valedictorian and president of the student council. At Princeton, he was president of Cannon Club, won a varsity letter in football, and “made a dispiriting slog” toward a civil engineering degree. Upon graduating he went to work for Bethlehem Steel, where he described himself as “a complete failure.” Facing compulsory military service George found an escape in the newly formed Peace Corps, where he served from 1961 to 1963.

An application to Yale Law School met with success, and George found his calling. Immediately out of Yale Law, he took a job with the Philadelphia Public Defender’s office. He embarked on a lifetime of defending activists, protesters, Black and White Panthers, draft resisters, and the like. An attempt at teaching law was unsuccessful; he found his footing in a solo law practice in Boulder, Colo., in 1981 and received the Boulder County Bar Association annual Award of Merit in 2005. Thrice unsuccessfully married, George wed Peggy Wrenn in 1985. They have one son, Colin.

Foreseeing debilitating illness, George terminated his life Nov. 20, 2022. In a note to “Dear Friends and Companions,” he said he was neither depressed nor sad but couldn’t do anything that he enjoyed and saw no reason to prolong things. Our condolences to his family.