Chapter Five
The Name You Carry
Blackett, Johnston, and the Story of a Middle Name
Robert Earl Blackett, 1886 – 1937
Robert Earl Blackett was born in Springville, Utah in 1886, the son of John William Blackett and Elizabeth Jane Averett — the daughter of Mormon Battalion veteran Jeduthan Hardy Averett. He grew up in one of Utah’s oldest pioneer communities, in a family whose roots in America stretched back to the Virginia frontier and, possibly, all the way to a Revolutionary War general.
Robert married Edna Mary Knudson on November 19, 1913, and together they had seven children: Robert Dean (1914), Fern (1918), Ned K. (1921), Julia Carol (1924), Shirley (1926), Joyce (1930), and Jimmy Dale (1933). He died in 1937 at age 51, and is buried in the Historic Springville Cemetery, alongside his parents.
Fern Blackett, 1918 – 2007 — Your Mother
One of Robert’s children was a daughter named Fern — your mother, Jerry. Fern Blackett was born November 4, 1918 in Provo, Utah, and she grew up in the Springville area with all the threads of this remarkable family history woven invisibly through her life.
On October 4, 1916, in Salt Lake City, a young man named John Paul Johnston had been born to Clarence Earl Johnston and his wife Tessie — the grandson of that Scottish pioneer boy who had crossed the American plains at seventeen.
And when John Paul and Fern named their son Jerry, they gave him the middle name Blackett — a quiet tribute to his mother’s family, to Robert Earl and Elizabeth Jane, to Jeduthan Hardy and his desert march, and to all the generations that had come before.
John Paul Johnston, 1916 – 1987 — Your Father
John Paul was one of four children born to Clarence and Tessie: his older sister Loraine (1910–2004), his brother Clarence Smith Johnston Jr. (1914–1975) — who served an LDS mission to New Zealand from 1937 to 1939 — John Paul (1916–1987), and the youngest, Frank Smith Johnston (1922–1985).
Tessie Sims Smith, John Paul’s mother, came from deep pioneer roots of her own. Her parents were John Gibson Smith (1855–1895, born in Tooele, Utah) and Hester Sims Smith (1857–1940, born in Salt Lake City). The Sims and Smith families were established Utah pioneer families, giving Jerry’s paternal grandmother a lineage that ran parallel to the Johnston pioneer story.
There is also a business connection in the Smith family that has recently come to light. Newspaper records from the early 1900s document the incorporation of the Gas Express and Transfer Company — a Salt Lake City business founded by a group of Smiths: Lydia K., G. Val, Gifford A., John T., and Ivy Smith, almost certainly Tessie’s siblings and family. An old family photograph, labeled “Gas Transfer Co.” and long believed to show Clarence Earl Johnston, now makes sense: Clarence had married into the family that ran that business, and would have been a natural presence in a company photograph.src
The House on 11th East
The home at 1811 South 11th East in Salt Lake City — where Bianca Johnston had died in 1916 — remained part of the family’s world for decades, and you still carry a few faint childhood memories of it, Jerry. You remember hidden doors between the dining room and the front room, and the delight of dinking around with them as a small boy, trying to work out how they opened. Under one of the beds was a large flat box, and inside it was long white hair — Tessie’s hair, you were told. The image stayed with you your whole life, though for years no one else could confirm it; you finally asked your cousin Arlee, who thought a moment and said: yes, that was true.
To reach the basement there were steep wooden steps down into what you remember as a kind of dungeon — poorly lit, a little frightening. In the last years of his life, after Tessie died in October 1954, your grandfather Clarence spent a great deal of time down there. Your father John Paul told you that Clarence had stopped eating and drinking properly. He was so broken by the loss of his wife that he was, in effect, willing himself toward her.
One day John Paul took you to Clarence’s bedside — just the two of you, father and son. It felt strange at the time, though you didn’t fully understand why. Clarence gave you a silver dollar. John Paul told you to shake your grandfather’s hand, and said quietly that it would be the last time you’d ever see him. You had no idea yet what that meant.
Clarence Earl Johnston died on August 7, 1956, at seventy years old. He is buried beside Tessie in the Salt Lake City Cemetery, in the same ground that holds James Johnston and Bianca Jane Gibson — four generations of the family that began on a tiny island off the north coast of Scotland.
John Paul married Fern Blackett on June 29, 1940 in Salt Lake City. Less than four months later, on October 16, 1940, he registered for the military draft — the first peacetime draft in American history had been signed into law just one month earlier. As a newly married man, John Paul likely received a dependency deferment (Class III-A), which would explain why he was not inducted despite being prime draft age. John Paul and Fern raised five children together: Paul, Karen, Rob, Jerry, and Bryan. John Paul died on June 23, 1987 at age 70, and is buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery — the same ground that holds James Johnston, Bianca Jane Gibson, Clarence Earl Johnston, and Tessie Sims Smith. Four generations of your family, Jerry, lie in that cemetery.
The Salt Lake City Cemetery is, in a very real sense, the Johnston family’s home ground. From James Johnston, the Scottish immigrant who arrived in 1854, to your own father John Paul — four generations of Johnstons rest in that ground.