By John Hartsock

jhartsock@altoonamirror.com

Dick Johnston stood only 5-foot-4 in junior high school and reached an eventual height of 5-8.

But as an athlete, even at a very young age, he was always a natural.

Johnston, who passed away on Jan. 23 in Fort Wayne, Ind. at the age of 76, graduated in 1966 from Altoona High School, where he was a three-year basketball starter, earning first team all-state honors in 1965 and ’66 and a scholarship to the University of Tennessee.

Johnston was also an outstanding baseball player, and Vince Nedimyer Sr., who was a close friend of Johnston’s as well as his high school teammate on the basketball and baseball squads, remembers him fondly.

“As an athlete, he was way ahead of his time,” Nedimyer said. “He was a year ahead of me in school, and we played on the baseball team together, and in the basketball program from the junior high level on.

“We played basketball for Jim Rice at Roosevelt and (the late) Frank Mastrocola at Altoona,” Nedimyer said. “(Johnston) was an outstanding baseball player who could hit, run and throw, but basketball was his niche. With the University of Tennessee people coming north of the Mason-Dixon Line to find a basketball player in Dickie Johnston, he had to be pretty good, right?”

Indeed he was. Johnston scored 1,427 points in his three-year high school career at Altoona before the 3-point line had come into play, including a personal-high 42-point game. Both set school records.

Nedimyer marveled at Johnston’s ball skills.

“From a young age, he was dribbling the ball behind his back and between his legs … the guy was unreal,” Nedimyer said of Johnston, who helped Altoona to a pair of District 6 basketball championships. “He had a great personality. He was a friendly guy who had a little cackle about him that just set him apart from everybody else.

“We stayed in contact throughout the years, and like everybody else, I was very saddened when I learned of his passing,” Nedimyer said.

Rice knew Johnston was something special on the basketball court at a young age.

“Even at 5-foot-4, he was the best player that I ever had, by far,” Rice said when Johnston was inducted into the Blair County Sports Hall of Fame in 2002. “We (Roosevelt) were undefeated that year, and (no opponent) even came close to us.”

Johnston was also recruited by the University of North Carolina for basketball, but chose Tennessee, where he was largely a sixth man and a playmaker for the Volunteers.

“Dick started some at Tennessee but played a lot there,” said Johnston’s older brother, Bob, who lives near Charlotte, N.C. “He was very, very good. At Tennessee, he never scored a lot, but his job was to get the ball to other people, and he did.”

Johnston made two appearances in the National Invitational Tournament at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, back in the days when the NIT was the top postseason event in college basketball.

He was also an outstanding free throw shooter, making 31 consecutive foul shots in his senior season with the Volunteers.

“I saw him play at the University of Tennessee, but one of my best memories of his basketball career there was when he made several free throws in the closing minutes of a game that helped Tennessee beat the University of Kentucky,” Bob Johnston said. “I was able to pick up a broadcast of that game on an old radio at our home in Altoona, and the announcers were getting all excited about that.”

Johnston spent his professional life in the Fort Wayne area as an accountant.

Survivors, along with his brother Bob, include three grown children and four grandchildren.