He spent 25 years as a painter at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, then another 14 as a painter at Virginia Tech. Evenings and weekends, he painted buildings all over Christiansburg - including the old First National Bank, Bank of Christiansburg, Vance Hardware and a downtown doctor's office. Most of his time was spent turning his craft into bread and butter for his family. But he never complained about his job.

Johnson died Aug. 16 at age 77.

He learned the importance of working hard as a child, one of a combined family of 12 children in Appalachia, Va. He quit school in the seventh grade to help support his family, just as his siblings had done. The coal miner's son joined the Army when he was 17 years old and served as an infantryman during World War II in France and Germany.

When other soldiers had a chance for R&R, they took it. Not Johnson.

"Daddy said he'd stay behind and do laundry when the others went to party," said his daughter Glenda Thornton of Christiansburg. "He didn't really talk about the war. He was quiet."

After the war, Johnson came home and married his lifelong friend Madeline Bledsoe and set about supporting the family they started. He continued serving in the Army, as a reservist, until 1963.

Thornton was born with cataracts and went through several surgeries to correct her vision. It took years for her parents to pay the bills, she said. They moved to Shawsville and then to Christiansburg when Johnson found a job with the paint crew at the ammunition plant. Madeline Johnson worked at the arsenal, too, but on the powder assembly line.

Ernie Johnson may have been quiet, but he still had a sense of humor. He packed his wife's lunch and would put strange food combinations or a toy snake in it just to get a rise out of her.

He was missing the tip of one of his thumbs from an accident while working on the railroad as a young man. If children asked what happened, he told them his kids bit it off. Or if he saw children picking their nose, he told them a booger bit his thumb off.

"He was easygoing. You never got the sense that he was worried about anything, so we weren't concerned about anything," Thornton said. "He hardly ever raised his voice."

Johnson worked at the arsenal until he was laid off in 1978, then painted for the university until 1992. He continued his side jobs, too, until he left Tech. When he got home from one paint job, he started another.

"He wasn't around a lot because of work," said his daughter Connie Worth of Christiansburg. But he did attend his son Tim's football games at Christiansburg High School, pacing quietly alongside the fence.

Worth and Thornton said they didn't inherit their dad's easygoing nature, but they did inherit his work ethic. Thornton has spent 20 years in the controller's office at Tech. Worth has been a calibration technician at Moog for 27 years. Another sister went into the Air Force.

"He taught us that you got to work," Thornton said. "Some days you don't feel like it, but it's what you got to do."

Worth said that after their dad retired, he was a little lost. Their mother died in 1988 and Johnson remarried. He and his second wife, Elizabeth, were married for 14 years, spending much of their time traveling to visit family.

"Providing for his family was what was most important to him," Connie Worth said. "Work was his hobby."