SOUTH ROYALTON — After four years of newspapering in Las Vegas, Warren Johnston was ready for a change of scenery.

Scenery being the optimum word. Johnston and his wife, Sandy, had in mind a place with more trees than asphalt and a night sky not lit in neon. 

Middle-aged Southerners without children, the Johnstons were always up for an adventure. Her husband had three job offers and he “picked the one that paid the least,” Sandy said.

In the summer of 2002, the Johnstons made the 2,700-mile move from Nevada to the Upper Valley. “We both had always wanted to live in New England,” Sandy said.

In his 13 years at the Valley News, Johnston held a variety of editing and reporting positions. After he retired in 2015, the couple remained in the Upper Valley for the “quality of life,” his wife said. 

With his newspaper career behind him, Johnston jumped into volunteering with the Upper Valley Trails Alliance and Alliance for Vermont Communities.

He played active roles in the Upper Valley’s land conservation and outdoor recreation arenas right up until his death last December at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon due to complications from cardiac surgery. He was 77. 

“Warren had the rare ability to move around to different regions of the country and fit in like a native almost instantly,” said Mary Scourtes, a colleague at the Tampa Tribune.

During a decade at the large metro daily, Johnston did everything from overseeing two bureaus with 18 reporters and photographers who covered local news to serving as international editor, which took him to Cuba, Guatemala and Mexico. In 1998, Johnston moved west to join the Las Vegas Sun as metro editor.

In a journalism career that spanned five decades, he worked at eight newspapers in six different states. “He left behind friends in newsrooms all across the country,” Scourtes said.   

In Johnston’s obituary, Mark Davis, another colleague in Tampa, described his former editor as a “true Southern gentleman, who epitomized the very best traits of the expression — soft spoken and slow to anger.”

In the early 2000s, the Valley News had a young reporter coincidentally named Mark Davis, who recalled a brief interaction with Johnston that stuck with him.

Davis, who didn’t report to Johnston, had used the word “folks” in a story. “Warren sidled up to me in the middle of the Monday after the story ran, and kindly explained that in newspapers there is no such thing as ‘folks,’ just people,” said Davis, who is now a senior editor at Vermont Public. 

“He did it in a very pleasant, laid-back Warren way, but it made me realize that by using the hackneyed word I was talking down to people. I never used the word again.”

Early on in his Valley News tenure, Johnston pitched then-Editor Jim Fox with an idea for a column. Before entering the world of newspapers, Johnston had worked in restaurants and opened a fine dining establishment in Atlanta with a longtime friend. 

“Warren’s good idea, drawing on his background in the restaurant business, was to seek out modestly priced wines that ordinary people could afford and enjoy, and suggest what kinds of food they could be matched with,” said Fox, who retired as editor in 2016. “I was initially a little skeptical as it was a bit of a departure for the Valley News, but the column proved to be wildly successful. It became one of the paper’s most popular features, and I think Warren took great pleasure in writing it — as many people did in reading it.”

The column’s name, “Raise Your Glass,” came from a Rolling Stones song, “Salt of the Earth,” which contains the line, “Raise your glass to the hard-working people.”

Later, Johnston’s column was picked up by other publications in the Newspapers of New England chain. 

“The notion of a small-town newspaper having someone who could write so well about wine struck me as uniquely special,” said Greg Fennell, a Valley News colleague. “I hope some of his knowledge rubbed off on me.”

Johnston grew up in Atlanta, playing football and running track at North Fulton High School, where he was twice elected class president. In 1969, he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Georgia.

After graduating he took a job in commercial real estate, but he was a writer at heart. He enrolled in the graduate journalism program at the University of Georgia and worked nights as a bartender. Sandy Gaines, a college art student, was a server at the restaurant.

In typical Johnston fashion, it took him a while to ask her out on a date. When he finally did, his “sense of humor” won her over, she said. They married in 1978.

“He always wanted to be a writer,” Sandy said. “It’s the reason he went to journalism school.”

In retirement, Johnston continued to write. At the time of his death, Johnston was working on two novels, both set in a Southern college town. His wife joked that in recent years, she spent vacations reading 14,000-word drafts of his works in progress.

Growing up, Johnston had hiked sections of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia and North Carolina. With his move to New England, Johnston found plenty of new hiking opportunities.

Around the same time that Johnston was retiring, a wealthy businessman from Utah began buying up large tracts of land — totaling 1,500 acres — in Royalton, Tunbridge, Strafford and Sharon. David Hall envisioned attracting 20,000 people to live in his settlement that he called NewVistas.

In 2016, Johnston joined the board of directors at Alliance for Vermont Communities, which was instrumental in blocking Hall from getting his large-scale development off the ground. In 2018, Hall abandoned his plans and sold his Upper Valley land holdings.

“Warren played a low-key role and didn’t often say much at our meetings, but he was always thoughtful,” said Michael Sacca, of Tunbridge, who served as the nonprofit’s board president. “He was a great help in us making connections with other organizations and the media.”

The group, its work complete, dissolved a couple of years ago. Johnston continued to put his energy into land conservation and encouraging people (not folks) to enjoy the region’s landscape. He served on the board of directors for the Upper Valley Trails Alliance, which has been promoting outdoor recreation in Vermont and New Hampshire since 1999.

“Warren was an avid hiker who helped out with our trail crews,” said Russell Hirschler, the nonprofit’s executive director since 2008.

Off the trail, Johnston was a mentor to Hirschler and his staff. “Warren was a beautiful writer and what he really imparted on us was the power of the written word to share the impact of our work with the community,” Hirschler said. 

Sacca and other friends of Johnston are have raising money for  a wooden bench in the Ashley Community Forest to be built in his memory. Johnston played an integral role in the preservation of the 256-acre forest, which the Alliance for Vermont Communities purchased in 2018 to curb Hall’s proposed NewVistas project. In 2022, the alliance donated the land to the towns of Sharon and Strafford.

Volunteering with the hiking and land preservation groups in the Upper Valley was something her husband “really grabbed onto,” Sandy Johnston said. “It means so much that people want to honor his memory.”

 Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com