From Northern Maine To Commander of US Naval Forces Europe. Meet Admiral "Grog" Johnson USN Ret.

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to, or watching, Radio Maine. Today I have with me USN Retired Admiral Gregory Johnson, also known as Grog. Thanks for being here today.

Greg Johnson: Well, Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here and thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: It's going to be hard for me to call you Grog, not knowing you particularly well. I think it's important that other people understand why it is that that is your nickname.

Greg Johnson: Well, it comes from my profession. I was in the Navy and I was a pilot, and all pilots have a call sign. You actually use it for practical purposes. Tactically that's the name of your flight. If you're the flight leader, it's a flight and you're doing radio checks and what have you. So everybody has a call sign and you don't actually get to pick your call sign. Not everybody gets to be a maverick. It evolved that my name's close to Greg, probably also had to do with a little bit of too much liberty or something with, as we call them, 12 ounce curls. And so I got the name Grog. That was in 1970. Most everybody that knows me from the Navy still calls me Grog.

Lisa Belisle: The Navy wasn't a natural path for you in life. You grew up in the county and you had the potential for going into potato farming. You thought you might want to be a lawyer, but ended up going into the military, unlike many of your family members. Tell me about that decision.

Greg Johnson: Well, ever since I was a young kid and started reading books, we had, the book came around once a month. And even when I was in grade school, I started reading books about law and lawyers and equal justice under law. I've had kind of an idealistic streak. So that was my consuming interest, to become an attorney. I went to the University of Maine after I graduated from Caribou High School. My major was government. Then I applied to one law school, which was University of Maine Law School. I was graduating in June of 1968 and there were no more deferments. I was told by the lady at the draft board in Caribou that I was going to graduate on June 7th, I think it was. On June 10th, she was going to give me a one-way ticket to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and in eight weeks, private Johnson, you're going to be headed for Vietnam. So that was a little bit of a denial. I had to withdraw from the University of Maine Law School. I got my $300 back and ended up going into the Navy with the attempt to do the minimum amount of time and then come back to law school. But as I found out, or as I learned, it was a really compelling career. And I stayed in and spent 36 years in the Navy.

Lisa Belisle: You and my father actually have a little bit of a parallel path. My mother and father were both at the university roughly the same time.

Greg Johnson: I knew who your father was.

Lisa Belisle: Yep. Charlie Belisle.

Greg Johnson: Charlie Belisle, he played football.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. And was in the Tangerine Bowl, I believe, somewhere around 1967.

Greg Johnson: I was at the University of Maine. I can't remember exactly which year it was.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Yes, somewhere in that time.

Greg Johnson: The late sixties, Youngstown State.

Lisa Belisle: There you go. There you go. I believe, well, we'll fit this history together, the two of us. But then also he ended up going into the Navy and went down to Jacksonville where he was doing his residency in family medicine. I was with him as a very small baby. I vividly remember just the culture of the Navy, came to learn that this was really the culture of the military in general. It was very family oriented. There was really a sense of comradery, and it was its own very kind of specific world. That's different than I think many of us who are not in the military encounter.

Greg Johnson: So you probably lived on NAS Jacksonville at the NAS Jacksonville Hospital?

Lisa Belisle: Well, I've been there. I don't remember it very well because I was quite young. But we lived in Orange Park, not far away.

Greg Johnson: That's where I had my first home. I was at Cecil Field, which is where the tactical airplanes were. And NAS Jax had helicopters and P-3s. Then it was Mayport where surface ships went off the coast. So that hospital served all of it. And in fact, our oldest daughter was born in that hospital. I spent all the time, first 25 years, flying in and out of Cecil Field. So we lived in Jacksonville a lot, including Orange Park.

Lisa Belisle: Oh, there you go. Yeah, I think at least maybe four siblings that actually may have been born in Jacksonville. There's 10 of us, so it's hard for me to keep track. But quite a few. So there's another kind of commonality.

Greg Johnson: So yeah, our first child was born there and the second child was born in Bethesda. I did my first assignment in the Pentagon.

Lisa Belisle: So I know that another commonality that you share with my parents is not growing up in a household that necessarily was pointing you towards an interest in art. My parents both have come to actually like and appreciate art in part through watching me do this work and watching me work with Portland Art Gallery. Yours was a different path.

Greg Johnson: Yeah, slightly. Books became important to me. Of course, your parents always pushed you because they wanted a better life for you. All the children were going to go to college. That's what they worked for. So books became very important. We didn't really have very many, but like I said, back in those days there was a bookmobile and it went around. So every month I would get two or three books, and I started reading books about law and I read fiction, read all kinds of books. So I had this passion for reading and slowly I started realizing how important artists and literature and poetry are, and it actually ties into my concept of the profession I was in. Because I thought of my profession as the profession of peace. I was in the peace business through national security, US national security, and the road to peace, I believe, comes through strength, and it's important for us to have a strong, credible military.

Greg Johnson: But also, of course we need the political and national backing. We have the will to use that force or it's not going to be of any good. So I was consumed by that and the diplomatic side of it. And I happened to work for some people who were extremely capable, polished diplomats. One was the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell. And I was his executive assistant for two years. And we traveled all over the world and I watched him. And then I worked three years in the office of the Secretary of Defense when a son of Maine was a Secretary of Defense, William Cohen. He was an incredibly effective and polished diplomat. And a way to break down barriers, whether you're in Russia, at that time it was a Soviet Union, or in our allies, is to talk about their culture and always have a line from poetry or who their famous authors are, or the artists or scientists.

Greg Johnson: Like you went to Serbia and you had to mention Tesla. So I always picked up that from them. I got very fascinated by it. We often visited US ambassadors and there was always art in their homes and in the embassies. And a couple of places we went where the ambassador was from Maine. Ambassador O'Leary, unfortunately passed away, but he was the ambassador in Chile. I was on a visit there with Secretary Cohen and he had a reception at his house and it was full of art from Maine. So when I became a senior commander in Europe and responsible for all the nations in Europe and Africa at that time, I got this book, Art of the Maine Islands. And I'd buy them 50 at a time. So when you travel, then you always wanted to have a house gift or a gift to leave to your counterpart, because they always gave you a gift.

Greg Johnson: So the gift that I used in the four years that I was a senior commander in Europe was this book. I kept buying them in boxes of 50. So throughout Africa and Europe, I don't know if you can still find them, but I bet I used about 150 to 200 copies of this particular book. I became fascinated by art and started trying to collect pieces with the modest resources that we had. But I also come back to this theme of peace and the business of peace, because you're always looking for the better angels of mankind. I think art and literature and poetry are certainly a critical, critical aspect of the better angels of mankind. And so I found that to be a very interesting venue or pathway to get to the better angels of people. And so I became quite interested in it, and of course my passion was for particularly Maine artists and things that spoke to me about Maine.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about some of your early favorites. If you're looking in the Art of the Maine Islands book, who was an artist that kind of spoke to you?

Greg Johnson: Well, of course all the very established and famous ones, which I don't have any of their art. From Winslow Homer to the Wyeths, to all manner of Fairfield Porter. I would look at those things. But I think the first piece of art I bought, and that was because my deceased wife was from Bucksport and her mother took art lessons from a guy named Francis Hamabe in Blue Hill. I think the first piece of art that I bought was some of his. And I have quite a few pieces from Francis Hamabe. Then I became familiar with Eric Hopkins, and as an aviator, Eric of course learned how to fly. And I think that greatly impacted the direction he went with his art. So I was fascinated by his work. And we have several Hopkins pieces both at my place in Harpswell and my current wife Carol Hancock at her house in Cas. So those are two artists in particular that really spoke to me and we have a lot of their works.

Lisa Belisle: Eric is known for doing a lot with horizon lines and also trees. So if you look, he has a very specific sort of tree, kind of looking down from above. So when you look at his art, does it mirror your experience of flying?

Greg Johnson: Well, that was the perspective I had on a lot of things because I spent a lot of time in the air. And so that fascinated me, and I like that. And of course, he had his islands and the trees and all that made me think of Maine and the coast. And so it really, excuse me, spoke to me and still speaks to me to this day.

Lisa Belisle: The interesting thing about Eric Hopkins, of course, is that he grew up on a Maine island himself. And so he has not only had this perspective from the air, but he also had a very unique perspective of having grown up on a fairly good size, but still remote Maine island.

Greg Johnson: Of course the Camden Hills are featured strongly in all of his paintings. And for Carol and me, who, she was a cancer widow and I was a cancer widower, and we were introduced to each other. And so we were actually engaged in Idaho, looking at the Camden Hills. We spent a lot of time in North Haven and we like it out there. And we're looking at the Camden Hills, and we actually got married at Point Lookout on the Camden Hills. So in that sense, it really speaks to us. And that's another reason why we're very attached to Eric and his paintings. And I got to know him pretty well, and he helped me on some things, as my passion is public higher education. And he did a nice job. When he had his gallery, his own gallery in Rockland, we did a University of Maine alumni meeting there that featured Maine and art. And he gave a painting as a door, he could sell the raffle tickets, and gave a wonderful presentation to those who were able to attend. I think that where his gallery was is where there's a contemporary art museum now in Rockland. And he was very generous with his time, even though of course he went to RISD, not to one of our schools. But yeah, wonderful, wonderful guy, a great son of Maine.

Lisa Belisle: Why is public higher education important to you?

Greg Johnson: Well, I went to the University of Maine. I grew up in a rural part of Maine and in a very tiny community with 50 people. We had a little one room schoolhouse, and I went eight grades there, and then I went to Caribou High School, and then I went to University of Maine, and that started opening up my horizons and expanding my field of view. And then I went off to the Navy. And I'll never forget when I left on my first deployment, it would've been three weeks before my first child. Our first child was born in early September of 1971, and I could not believe that I was going to be on this US aircraft carrier and we're going to go across the entire Atlantic Ocean. And so I spent my life doing that and it brought a sense of wonderment. So that's a part of how I realized that higher education really opened up my horizons.

Greg Johnson: So when I came back to Maine, I wanted to get engaged in public higher education. And I have been with the University of Maine. I was on their Board of Visitors and I was on the board of trustees for the system for two terms. I was an overseer for nine years, the Board of Overseers at Colby. I was even on the board of MECA for a while until I had to resign from that because I was engaged with the University of Maine. So I think public higher education, I call it the trip ticket for the rural corners of Maine. And everybody forgets if they live in Cumberland and York counties, that that's only about 10% of the state, and there's 90% of it that's rural and not as well resourced, and public higher education is the trip ticket, and not only for them individually, but for the economic wellbeing of the entire state. So I'm very passionate about it.

Lisa Belisle: Well, having practiced in rural areas and now being up at the hospital up in the Augusta, Waterville area, and working with younger patients who have gone into the University of Maine system, I think you're describing something that's really important. It becomes something that is more accessible and it is a way for people to broaden their horizons without even leaving the state.

Greg Johnson: True. And of course very interested in bringing more research and development dollars to our one research university that we have, which doesn't have a medical school, as you well know, which hurts you a little bit in another source besides National Science Foundation. The various government agencies that do research, of course, are NIH. And without a medical school, it's harder to compete for grants from them. But that's all very important. And of course, we now have the program with Tufts, and I think there used to be an affiliation with the University of Vermont Medical School. So we're still reaching out, but more importantly, bringing doctors, dentists, lawyers, and professional people to the far corners of the state, because not only is that profession required, but they're also pillars of their respective communities. The social fabric of our communities is evaporating. That's another area of concern in our rural communities, particularly in Aroostook County. And what I call the Rim County, Washington, Piscataquis, Washington County, what have you, the far reaches of Penobscot, Somerset, Franklin and Oxford. So that's really an area not of concern, but an area of some passion for me.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I think you and I share similar concerns because one of my jobs as the Assistant Chief Medical Officer is recruiting and retention for the Waterville/Augusta area. It's been really gratifying to see one of our recent surgeons that came in went to Colby. Another surgeon that came in actually went to Caribou High School and then went to the University of New England and came back. So I do think that there is opportunity there. I think that people are understanding that Maine has a lot to offer and that these communities really do have great education. We're trying to build and maintain great healthcare and even the arts opportunities that you're describing.

Greg Johnson: So I think there's a lot to sell. I think it's a great place to raise families. A lot of our people go away, start families, but then they come back. I think there was a big push on that during the pandemic, during COVID, and people came back. And of course with the way workforces are employed now, people are able to work from home a lot. And this is another important aspect of this whole thing about education and what you have, is getting broadband into the nooks and crannies of the state of Maine. I think that'll also help populate these areas. And of course, it's what we call the trailing spouse. If one person gets a job, what is the partner and the relationship going to be? How are they going to get employed? Which is always a challenge in our rural areas. Even Jackson Labs, our universities, what have you, they have these kinds of challenges. So there's a lot I think we could do about that. And broadband is a big part of that as well.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah. And again, another parallel, because when I think about what we're trying to do in healthcare, we have digital equity. There are many patients who don't necessarily have smartphones and have access readily, but if we can actually connect them to our medical staff with broadband and enable that ongoing connection, I think that that and education are really the pillars that you're describing that will bring and keep people in our state.

Greg Johnson: So I think supporting and building interest, and for Augusta to strongly support public higher education, is very critical for the reasons we just discussed. But also I think we have great opportunities. The Route 93 corridor in Massachusetts starts to spread out into Southern New Hampshire and into southern Maine. We've got to provide a workforce that can take those kinds of jobs. I think we're working at it. I think the Roux Institute will help, that's a good advancement forward. Hopefully there's ways that the public higher education system in Maine can leverage and cooperate and collaborate with them to feed more people to create a workforce. In some ways we've been tied to the industrial revolution. We've got to jump into the information age, and not only in terms of creating or developing a workforce that can work there, but in the minds of the citizens of Maine. They've got to forget about textile factories and shoe factories and pulp and paper mills and leapfrog into the next information age.

Lisa Belisle: How have you maintained your connection to the county? And for people who are listening or watching, we're talking about Aroostook County. You and I know what this means because we are from Maine. But how do you maintain your connection?

Greg Johnson: Well, I still have some relatives up there. And it's kind of a little sad to say it this way, but my father and my brother are buried in the little cemetery in Westmanland, and my mom will be buried there, and I still have some aunts and uncles that live up there. So when my dad died, my mom moved to Brunswick. That was fortuitous because I had been to Brunswick like once in my life before she moved there. I was in the Navy then. That brought us to Harpswell and started looking at Harpswell. So in 1992, while I was still in the Navy, we bought a piece of property, had an old farmhouse and a barn on it, and about 50 acres of land that either had springs in it, so you couldn't drive on it, or was ledge, but it was called a farm. Then when I retired in 2004, we came back there to live. I had never even heard of Harpswell until my mother moved to Brunswick and we started going to the Dolphin Marina, the old Dolphin Marina. My wife at the time declared that this is where we're going to live when I retire. So she wasn't going back to Bucksport and we weren't going back to the county. So that's how I ended up in Harpswell.

Lisa Belisle: Since I went to Bowdoin and also went to University of Maine, I spent time at the old Dolphin Marina and appreciated both the old Dolphin and the new Dolphin. All that Harpswell was and is, I think it is a really, really beautiful part of the state. I also think about these other beautiful parts of the state, like the county, that are equally wonderful but maybe don't have the salt water or the same kinds of views. And I think about how we encourage people to not only visit those parts of the state, but also stay there and also work there. What you're describing I think is really important to the opportunities.

Greg Johnson: I think the county's having a real challenge these days and they're starting to get focused. I get the Bangor Daily online and track the county edition and try to keep track of what it's doing. But I know Houlton and Presque Isle and Fort Fairfield and Caribou and St. John Valley at various towns up there are all trying to find ways to attract people to come up there. And of course, real estate is a bargain, relatively speaking. There's a lot of it available. When I grew up, I think the county peaked at about 110,000 people, and now there's just about 62 or 63,000 people. So it's been quite a draw down in the people and the human resources that are there. And hopefully, and I think it will, all of this about getting broadband accessibility. It's a wonderful place. I loved growing up there and wouldn't trade it for anything.

Lisa Belisle: So growing up in the county, first of all, you didn't know that you would join the Navy. You didn't know that you weren't going to be a lawyer, you didn't know that you were going to like art. I assume you probably didn't have any sense that you'd be traveling the world alongside people who were really effectively acting as ambassadors. Do you look back at your younger self and have any thoughts about what you might say to that person?

Greg Johnson: To people that are now in my place?

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, because I think sometimes when you grow up in a very specific way, you don't really know what could actually be out there.

Greg Johnson: No, you don't know. Up until the day I joined the Navy, I never would've thought that I would've ever been in that profession, if I was not part of ROTC at Maine. No one in my family had been in the military. But when an opportunity came, I took it because in reality, I wanted to avoid the draft, which is why I picked the program called Aviation Officer Candidate School, which was just like the movie Officer and a Gentleman. And my drill instructor was just like Lou Gossett in that movie. And that transformed my life. And I got in there and then I had an opportunity to go to the Naval War College in a special program where they wanted to take some lieutenants to the junior course in Newport. And so that was as close as I could get to Maine.

Greg Johnson: So I volunteered for this program. There were six of us, and once I went to the Naval War College, that's when I had this transformation in my mind that aviation wasn't an end in itself. It was a means towards an end. And the end I was in was the national security business. The output from that should be peace, and peace that provides an environment where every individual can maximize their aspirations and their full potential. That's what I thought I was doing, and once I had put it in that context and that way of approaching my career, then I made the decision, no, this is something I want to stay and be part of. That's what I thought I was doing, and those were the outputs that I thought were important. I think in some ways we have been successful. In terms of outlook worldwide, I say I'm a moderate realist, a passionate internationalist, and I have a streak of idealism in me. And I still like to think that American democracy and free market are the way of the future. But right now, autocratic rule is in ascendancy, and democracy is actually in decline. So I find this very concerning when you move from Maine or the United States to a world stage. And I think we all should take pause from that and think about what things can we do to turn that trend around and get it going in the other direction.

Lisa Belisle: So one of the things that you did was to try to connect through art and culture with people. Do you feel like there's a way that we could take that lesson and use it more broadly as we try to get back on the same wavelength with people around the world?

Greg Johnson: Yes, I absolutely do. Again, I view the arts and humanities to take the rough edges off from all of us. And what I've learned, we hate to admit it, and we sometimes get engaged in wishful thinking, that whatever genes there are in us that can quickly turn us to do the most horrible things against fellow men and mankind. I believe that that's unfortunately a latent capacity that you can't imagine. But people have them, and when times are changing rapidly and people are fearful, there's always a demagogue that can come along and play that music and people will often respond to it. And so I think that anything we can do in terms of the arts, the humanities, like I said, that brings out the better angels in us. And so I think it's a very important instrument.

Greg Johnson: Music is a universal language. Art is a universal language. Literature is a universal language. And so I think they're very important. So I'm a big proponent of the humanities. And we need all the STEM to keep competitive and R&D, but we need to have what I call the liberal education of a university. And yes, you have the technical skills and we need that to compete in the world today, but we also need to make sure people are well grounded in the humanities. That's also part of becoming good citizens and having something that feeds and grows those better angels, that part of the DNA, so that we cannot be vulnerable to those who might come. There's all kinds of demagogues and autocracy in the world today. But I think that this is one way that we can put up some barriers to that.

Lisa Belisle: So it sounds like what you're saying is we need to look to the arts to strengthen these better angels to kind of combat the other side of things.

Greg Johnson: I think if people can appreciate it, whether it's music, whatever it is, I think that that is a good prophylactic for the darker side. But of course, even people who are masters of that use the arts to try to help them too. Nazi Germany was very prolific in it. Some of the best music, dance, and literature in the world is Russian literature, dance and music. So it can go both ways. But I think on the whole, it's very important. And I think it's very important in our schools that, as times get hard, the other areas, physical education and physical training. I think our country spends way more than anybody else on healthcare, and we do acute care very well. And we don't do health and wellness very well at all.

Greg Johnson: And so our outputs are deteriorating, they're not improving, they're getting worse. That's a troublesome thing. Same with education. Our education system, we've put more in it than any other country. Yet our outputs, as we just learned last week, are downward. So I consider those to be incredibly important issues that we need to address. And unfortunately, we're at a time where our government has forgotten that they're in there to govern. They forgot the governing part. And so I find that quite concerning. And I think it's probably one of the biggest issues. In fact, the profession I come from, the cohort group we're interested in, is 18 to 24 year olds. And right now in America, only 30% of all the young people in America who are between 18 and 24 are eligible to serve in the armed forces of the United States.

Greg Johnson: 70% of them just plain aren't able to pass the ASVAB test, because our schools have become a factory and they push 'em through, and they can't do the tests they can't, because of obesity, drug abuse, all kinds of reasons. 70% of America's youth can't even serve in the armed forces of the United States. So I think that should be something that should concern people. Also the idea of public service is, I think, eroding as well. Government is having a hard time filling jobs. The services are all having a hard time recruiting people. And I think our military in particular should be an exact mirror image of society. And that's not the case, particularly so not on socioeconomic grounds, and rural poor and inner city poor, they're the people who end up fighting for us, kind of how this has been. And so I think that that's something that we ought to take a look at. I'm not saying we should go back to the draft, but I would think that we might start thinking about universal public service, which I would be very much in favor of.

Lisa Belisle: Well, you've given me a lot to think about. We have a lot of different areas that we could start to work at. It does actually make me happy because my youngest daughter's boyfriend is in the Army, and he is out of Fort Drum. He's on a helicopter flight crew. He is one of the ones who has chosen to join the military and has passed all of the tests and recently was promoted. I look to Ryan as a kind of hope for the future. So the good thing about what you're describing is that we have people who are currently doing this. We have people who are working on it. So even though we've got a lot of room to move, we're still moving forward in a positive direction.

Greg Johnson: Yeah. And right now I'm very proud of Ryan and I wish him very well and thankful for his service. The number of families that have a relative, uncle, cousin, parent who served is getting smaller and smaller. It used to be 70% of our Congress had prior military service, now it's around 15%. So it's actually the people that are on active duty tend to be all sons and daughters of people who were on active duty. So we're narrow necking down. In a democracy, I don't think that's the direction we should be going.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I will say we have a lot of people in my family in the military, so I feel like we're doing our part. And also I agree with you. I think that the military is a good career path that more people should consider. And I think it should go really across the demographics, because we are talking about promoting peace, as you described.

Greg Johnson: Yeah. In fact, I'm sure your dad probably tended to me or my family all those years. We lived in Jacksonville, we were there all through the seventies. I don't know what years he was there. And all through the eighties.

Lisa Belisle: He was there at the beginning of the seventies.

Greg Johnson: So there you go. We were there too. And that's the hospital we went to.

Lisa Belisle: I'm sure he'll be watching this, as will my mom, who was also down there with him.

Greg Johnson: I think they came to an alumni event that I had in my barn in Harpswell.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, they did.

Greg Johnson: I remember reaching out to him and he was kind enough to attend one of those. So say hi and go Black Bears.

Lisa Belisle: All right. Mom and dad, you heard this, Mary and Charlie. You heard this from Grog Johnson. Hi. And go Black Bears. Okay. Well, it's been a real pleasure to talk with you today. I think you have a broad perspective on things and really are a son of Maine. It makes me happy to know that you're back and you're in the state and you're passionate about the work that you're doing.

Greg Johnson: Well thank you. I didn't even get to all the artists I wanted to mention, but anyway, the real person I wanted to shout out as well is Emma.

Lisa Belisle: Oh, Emma Wilson.

Greg Johnson: I didn't know her, but Carol knows her and they've been close for a long time. And we've just had a project at our house. Well, Carol did some redoing of her house in Cas and bought some new pieces of art. So Emma's been out there many times and brought all kinds of things to look at, put 'em in different places and helped us decide what to buy. Then she came to our place several times, not only to help decide which ones to buy but to organize what we already had by telling us where to put them and even helped hang. She's wonderful. Did I mention Philip and Matt Barter? No. Jane Dahmen and Eric Hopkins. And Ann Trainor Domingue.

Lisa Belisle: Ann Trainor Domingue is how she pronounced it.

Greg Johnson: Yes. So we have a lot of Portland Art Gallery artists in between her house and mine. Most of them, we have their stuff in both places. So anyway, we love Portland Art Gallery and Emma, and until about a month ago, I didn't know that Kevin was the owner and that you were involved with this. So I considered it a great honor to have had this conversation with you. We also push photography too. We have a lot of photography and there's one in particular, I'll put a plug in for him. His name is Rob Smith, and he lives just down the road from us in Harpswell. And he's a fantastic photographer. We also have some by a guy named Clyde Butcher and Tom Menon. We have some, and we have quite a bit of sculpture too, and glass. So all different areas, and it all speaks to us in different ways and always takes the rough edges off things.

Lisa Belisle: Yes.

Greg Johnson: Better angels.

Lisa Belisle: Better angels.

Greg Johnson: We want those better.

Lisa Belisle: Angels. That's right. And I feel the same way about the art we have in our house.

Greg Johnson: Yeah. It all speaks to us every single day. And you don't even realize it, but I think it softens the edges all the time.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and I've been speaking with USN Retired Admiral Gregory Johnson, also called Grog. I really appreciate the time that he's taken to come and speak with me today. And thank you so much for all the work that you're doing for the State of Maine.

Greg Johnson: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I enjoyed our conversation and thank you for what you're doing through these various broadcasts that you do.

Lisa Belisle: My pleasure. You've been listening to or watching Radio Maine.