In a drearily conformist world, iconoclasts like Donald S. Johnston are a splash of bright paint against a dull canvas.
Think of it as monument to the peculiarity of his weird Uncle Donald, which is what his family called the man back in Regina.If that name sounds familiar, it’s because his story has been told before. Johnston gained a measure of celebrity in the 1940s and ‘50s after inventing what he claimed was a rainmaking device he called the “universcope.” Give him 36 hours — usually less — and he could make the sky fall, he told the Vancouver Sun in 1949, pointing to a string of successes.
Close to 100 people showed up as Johnston, portrayed by the Colonist as an underrated genius , set his metronomic moisture-maker swinging at moonrise in a farmer’s field east of Central Saanich Road between Tanner and Keating Cross. “Mr. Doocer has been so successful with recent heat-inducing experiments that many Saanich farmers hold him responsible for the unprecedented drought which has stricken the peninsula,” stated the story, which was accompanied by a photo of Doocer and his device, which involved the use of oscillating grapefruit.
“I have great fun having guests guess what it is,” he says. “Not surprisingly, no one has come close.” Brown, whose mother was Johnston’s big sister, remembers his uncle as a cantankerous man who “walked that thin line between genius and insanity.”
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