Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020 | 2 a.m.
He could have gone to Hawaii, but concern over having to quarantine his cats landed Dr. Joe Johnson in Las Vegas instead.
It worked out well for the cats, and the fighter pilots, UNLV sports leaders, A-list Strip performers and generations of everyday Las Vegans he treated in the nearly 45 years he spent practicing medicine here before retiring in October.
“I’ve had more fun than I really deserve,” said Johnson, 72.
There’s a Johnson family saying, he shared: “When it’s raining beans, make sure your plate’s turned up.”
Joe Johnson keeps his plate up and full.
Former UNLV men’s basketball coach Lon Kruger was one of Johnson’s patients when he was with the Rebels — Johnson’s patient roster has included UNLV athletic directors from Charlie Cavagnaro to Jim Livengood and men’s basketball and football coaches, plus their families.
Kruger said Johnson could get into any game, any show anywhere in Las Vegas — not because people owed him, but because Johnson had done so much for so many.
Kruger, who met Johnson shortly after moving here in 2004, would know. As Kruger’s personal doctor, Johnson required patients to undergo annual exams and stress tests. One of Kruger’s in 2007 turned up a silent, potentially fatal heart condition, and within a week the coach was under the scalpel for six-way bypass surgery. He’s had no problems since.
“Who knows what would have happened had he not demanded that,” said Kruger, who left UNLV in 2011 for his current post as head coach at the University of Oklahoma.
Johnson, the youngest of six, didn’t initially see medicine as his calling. He set out to earn an agriculture degree at Arkansas State University, not far from the family farm he’d grown up on in McCrory, Ark., population 1,500. Young “Joe Bill” also wanted to go into the farming business.
A zoology professor saw something more in Johnson’s way with people and encouraged him to attend medical school. After graduating from Arkansas State and then the University of Arkansas School of Medicine, Johnson volunteered in 1975 for the medical corps of the Air Force. He initially put in for a duty station at Hickham Air Force Base in Honolulu, but after learning that he would have to quarantine his beloved pets for 90 days upon moving to the islands, he went with Nellis Air Force Base.
The Nellis-based Thunderbirds demonstration squadron didn’t have a dedicated physician, so Johnson was assigned to address their unique physiological needs as a flight surgeon, plus serve as a “back seater,” or weapons systems officer. His favorite plane was the F-4 Phantom, and despite his pilots’ best attempts at making him airsick with their aerobatics, it never happened.
After two years of service, Johnson rejoined civilian life with a private practice in still-young Henderson; Sunset Road was still partially gravel, he said.
Johnson hung out his shingle on Aug. 17, 1977. He remembers the date because it was the day after Elvis Presley died. He also moonlighted in the emergency room at St. Rose Dominican Hospital — “the nuns got me,” he said cheerfully — which led to being its chief of staff for four years.
He held staff privileges at all of Las Vegas’ hospitals at one point. He also had an office at TIMET’s Henderson facility, which he visited on his final day as a working physician, practicing industrial medicine for the workers at the titanium sponge production plant.
And there was time for more: positions with the Clark County Medical Society, Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners, Nevada State Medical Association, stints as an adjunct professor at the UNLV medical school.
In the 1980s, a uniquely Las Vegas side gig opened up in the entertainment industry: treating performers. He got to know entertainers and their agents, and he built up relationships with personalities as diverse as Luke Bryan and Steven Tyler, Gladys Knight and Andrea Bocelli, Kanye West and Blake Shelton, Carrot Top and Carlos Santana. Johnson speaks warmly but broadly of these headliners, respecting patient-doctor confidentiality, but shows them to be especially agreeable by pulling up pictures on his phone of several of them holding up copies of the Woodruff County Monitor, the McCrory newspaper.
Johnson’s knack for spotting cardiac issues saved a trio of sports figures: Kruger; a former football coach while his heart attack was in progress — Johnson won’t name the coach, but said the coach would tell the story of what he thought was just bad indigestion — and Livengood, UNLV’s athletic director from 2009 to 2013.
Livengood and Johnson played golf together every weekend while Livengood was at UNLV. Johnson was savvy enough to know to refer Livengood to a specialist when he suspected heart issues. Livengood underwent surgery in February.
“He’s just a wonderful person in addition to being a great doctor,” Livengood said from Tucson, Ariz., where he lived and helmed the University of Arizona athletics program for 16 years before his time at UNLV. “He kind of personifies for me what Las Vegas is about.”
About six years ago, Dignity Health, now the St. Rose parent company, acquired Johnson’s solo practice. He had been toying with retirement since roughly that time though.
Systems of delivery have changed with the shift to electronic health records and more burdensome bureaucracy, Johnson said. In his view, there is no doctor shortage but a shortage of time doctors have to give to their patients. He said there weren’t many physicians like him left, a concierge doctor before the term became popular.
“Sick people haven’t changed and their treatments haven’t changed appreciably, outside of outliers like COVID,” he said.
Gregarious and engaging, he likes to listen as much as he does talk, about sports and fine cigars and travel. It’s part of his process: “It makes your job easier when you know what’s going on in the family, in someone’s work situation.”
In addition to his longtime Henderson practice, he has lived in the same house in Green Valley for more than 30 years.
“I send my warm wishes to Dr. Joe Johnson upon hearing of his retirement. Dr. Johnson, a longtime Henderson physician and icon within the medical community, is known for his unmeasured compassion and care with his patients from all backgrounds,” said Henderson Mayor Debra March. “Knowing his love of golf, I am sure there are many tee times in his future. May his legacy of service encourage and inspire us during these challenging times.”
Johnson rises before the sun. He takes long walks before his early tee times. He reads voraciously, mostly fiction. He still cares about his cats — he feeds ferals that run up to greet him.
And he’s trying to keep up a daily golfing streak. He was at 26 consecutive days at last count, between the Las Vegas and South Shore country clubs — a streak that Kruger said sounded very much like him.
After the pandemic calms, Johnson hopes to visit another friend in Oklahoma, the country superstar Toby Keith, for a round at the golf course Keith owns in Norman. The two go back more than 20 years.
