Roy Clinton "Bud" Johns, Jr. (July 9, 1929 - February 15, 2019) is an American writer, editor, author and publisher who was influential in environmental and progressive causes throughout the second half of the 20th century and early 21st.
He is also known in the sports world as founder (in 1971) of Ride and Tie,[1] a conversion to racing of a historic means of transportation for two individuals who had only one horse and needed to travel a long distance.
[2] Raised in a series of small Michigan towns, Johns began his newspaper career as a regional correspondent for the daily Flint Journal and weekly Flushing Observer.
He enrolled at Albion College with a down payment of one-third of his first semester's tuition and worked his way 100 per cent as a reporter for the Albion Evening Recorder, weekly sports columnist for the Journal and its fellow Booth Michigan Newspapers, waiting tables for his meals and officiating high school football and basketball games.
He recalled having read about the old-fashioned custom of two people sharing a single horse on a journey by alternately riding and tying the horse where the other person could come up to it an mount, turn by turn, years before beginning to work for Levi Strauss & Co. Johns first heard such a story while researching the history of Pine Valley, California to promote it on behalf of a real estate developer.
In England, in March 1737, Dr. Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick (later to become the noted actor) had traveled that way 120 miles to London because they had only enough money to rent one horse and stay one night in an inn.
In 1742 Henry Fielding's novel History of Joseph Andrews concluded a chapter about the ride and tie journey of two travelers with “...and that is that method of traveling so much in use among our prudent ancestors.”[15] In addition to his primary corporate communications responsibilities – media relations, company publications, product publicity and involvement with investment relations – Johns directed the championship race its first 14 years and advocated establishment of the event elsewhere.
[16] In 1968 Johns founded Synergistic Press which has published an eclectic list focusing on non-fiction including biography and art subjects.
[22][23] Johns was married to the artist Judith Spector Clancy whose drawings of architectural notable buildings were widely published in magazines, from 1971 until her death in 1990.