“My last Marine Corps assignment was comptroller at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego,” Johnson, who also served in posts at the Pentagon and the U.S. Embassy in China during his military career, said. “I was asked to put in my resume to become CEO of the $3 million Marine Corps Recruit Depot Federal Credit Union. I left the Corps on a Friday and reported to the credit union Monday morning.”

Johnson had learned that four members of the struggling credit union's board, who had worked for him at the recruit depot, recommended him for the credit union post, and this initially made him skeptical of their intent. However, he soon learned that the credit union was in trouble with regulators and his leadership skills would be put to good use.

“I announced to my new staff that I was highly qualified to paint and sweep,” Johnson remembered. “Everything else I would have to learn.”

With the help of more experienced credit union executives, Johnson quickly learned his new trade, stabilizing the tiny credit union and doubling its assets in four years. Most importantly, Johnson said, he was bitten by the cooperative bug after which there was no going back.

In 1976, Johnson was offered the top slot at seven-year old Western Corporate Federal Credit Union, better known as WesCorp, then located in San Dimas, Calif. It was a position he would hold until 2002, when he officially retired at age 78 after 26 years of service.

WesCorp, caught up in the corporate credit union meltdown, was placed into NCUA conservatorship in 2009. The corporate credit union was officially dissolved in 2012.

Despite its demise, Johnson believed that the corporate system was a major milestone for the credit union movement. The corporates for the first time allowed the credit union community to stand on independent financial footing, he explained.

“You will note my bias here, but credit unions created a miracle when they built the corporate system,” Johnson said. “In the years before, virtually every credit union had a bank or savings and loan account where they invested, borrowed, left their liquidity and did all their financial transactions. In the course of 20 years, that trend reversed and all the income previously earned by banks was retained by the credit unions.”

In addition to the financial recession, a lack of adequate NCUA examiners trained to understand wholesale credit unions' operations were among the challenges faced by the corporates during their early days, Johnson said. More than one corporate struggled with examiners that their executives felt lacked the proper background to regulate the more complex institutions.

“WesCorp was severely affected by these regulators,” Johnson said. “The NCUA had lots of experience in examining natural-person credit unions, but they were undergoing on-the-job training in examining corporates. The examiners had lots of authority, only basic technical knowledge and a fear of losing their jobs.”

In addition to its educational shortcomings, the NCUA's success in managing the corporates and other areas depended on who occupied the chairman's seat and that person's attitude toward the agency's relationship with the credit unions it regulated.

“To my mind, when Edgar Callahan was appointed NCUA chairman [in 1981], things dramatically began to change,” Johnson said. “Ed and his team of Chip Filson and Bucky Sebastian shook the entire credit union movement and took an ax to the old-boy network. They thought outside the box; in fact, they didn't even recognize there was a box.”

Sen. Roger Jepsen, who was appointed chair in 1985, built on what Callahan had started, spending a lot of time in the field learning about credit unions. It was when Norman D'Amours was named chairman in 1993 that things took a turn for the worse, Johnson said.

“Disaster struck with Jepsen's successor, who announced early on that he was the regulator and we were the regulated,” Johnson said. “I called it 'shooting the wounded,' and we almost lost the corporate system then.”

D'Amours led the NCUA during a period of increasing unsettlement throughout the movement. He was succeeded by then-sitting board member Dennis Dollar, now a consultant, who managed to steady the ship amid the movement's roiling waters, Johnson said.

These days, Johnson, a widower for the past six years, spends his time reading (he admits to being a world news junkie) and swimming an hour a day – a natural progression for a former scuba diver who has made more than 1,000 dives. He also spends a great deal of time writing, communicating and entertaining visitors.

“I am visited by my former Wes-Corp employees and the few Marines left still on this side of the grass,” he said.

As for life lessons, Johnson said he has learned as much from his decades of credit union service as he did during his military career. Several of those lessons cross the boundary between his two stints of service.

Training employees to pay attention to members and their wants and needs is what sets credit unions apart, he explained, adding that in that same way, credit unions must understand the humanity within their staffs and respond accordingly, both to improve their service to the credit union and the credit union's service to them.

“As the years roll by, everything will change except people's quest for acceptance,” Johnson added. “When the inevitable day comes – as it will for us all – the only thing that will have counted are the people.”