Meet Collector Craig Johnson
Reprinted from "Crown Jewels of the Wire", February 2007, pg 12

Hello all. My name's Craig Johnson, and I'm here to confess to a deep, dark secret. A secret that's been kept in the closet for a good twenty five years:

I COLLECT INSULATORS.

I've always loved insulators, but never knew they were on the web - until now. This obsession of mine began when I was very young, and all got started on a family vacation. We had just passed under some transmission towers, and I kept seeing these blue things like big flat beads on a chain. I asked my dad what those "things" were, and he told me, "They're insulators".

Turns out, he was right. Those beautiful shimmering blue things I saw up there dangling from those tall metal towers were transparent aqua suspension disks, assembled into groups of about 8 or 10 to hold the high voltage lines safely out of reach and off the towers.

When I returned to my hometown of Juneau Alaska and gained a few more years of knowledge (and observed a LOT of different kinds of insulators on poles), I decided it was time to go to the old goldmine on Mount Roberts and start poking around. Soon, I came up with my first insulator: the bottom half of a two-piece tramp in very light aqua. Then I dug up a brown porcelain cable-type insulator, used commonly on lower voltage distribution lines, and some small white porcelain spools. A power substation was located near the mines, so I asked a lineman about what was inside, and if any old insulators were available to be had.

"I was led to a darker, seemingly unused corner..."

What a thrill it was to get a complete tour of the substation, complete with diesel backup generators large enough to power half the city! But the best was yet to come, for after my little "tour" was finished up, I was led to a darker, seemingly unused corner of the substation, just crammed full of mostly porcelain insulators!

The large wagon I brought along in case I found old phones or magnetos soon began to fill up with insulators. Pin-type porcelain uniparts, umbrella-style multiparts, suspension disks, glass telephone insulators, and a porcelain strain or two started piling up in the wagon. Most were in mint or near mint condition; the most serious damage to any of them being perhaps a tiny chip out of a skirt.

Within the hour, I left the power station, and struggled to pull the severely overloaded wagon through downtown Juneau, across the Juneau-Douglas bridge, up the very steep Cordova Street, and finally to the end of Nowell Avenue where my house was.

After a brief respite, I started unloading my booty: A number of porcelain uniparts in several sizes (type unknown, but physically they looked like brown versions of U941's), a couple of large porcelain multiparts, several sets of suspension disks in three different sizes, a couple of porcelain strains (these were used on guy wires and as dead-ends for low volt lines), some glass insulators like Hemi 42's in blue, aqua and clear; a Brookfield petticoat in aqua, and some small white two-piece nail-on porcelains that were often used in early residential construction.

Not long after, I visited the remains of a prominent house fire on the way home from school. The site was now just a few inches of charcoal & ashes on the ground, and found some white porcelain two piece "nail ons" that came from the rafters underneath the house. And that's how the obsession began. That's what started me into my life as an insulator nut.

Unfortunately, I could not afford to take all of my insulators with me when I moved to Seattle in 1985. For all I know, they're still languishing in a basement bedroom in some house that probably belongs to a total stranger now.

"People collect those things?"

Fast-forward to today, approximately thirty years later. I'm now 42 and living in a downtown Sacramento apartment, 1,659 miles from my old friends and my old insulators - and a few years ago I started building my collection all over again, pretty much from scratch. Because of low funds at moving time, I lost all of my porcelain multiparts, all of my suspension insulators, and a couple of (fortunately, more common) glass insulators.

My new collection started small, but grew very fast. Only a couple of pieces came with me from Juneau; the rest have been acquired since moving to Seattle; and subsequently, to Sacramento. Some of my neighbors are still scratching their heads. "People collect those things?", and "what the heck are those?" are some of the comments I've received when somebody sees my special jewels sparkling in the living room window.

These are some of the people who will never know the joy of seeing some filthy blackened hunk of glass sink into a bowl of warm soapy water, and emerge a moment later sparkling like a giant amethyst or sapphire fresh from the jewelry store.

They'll never know what it's like to hold a battered and bruised insulator, wondering just what it lived through during the last hundred years of its life. What kind of conversations filtered through that oxidized copper or steel wire it held in its wire groove. Who's electric light globe received the gift of power because of it. Or what fascinating insect overwintered underneath its protective skirt. They'll never experience the joy of reaching into a musty rotted wooden crate and freeing a set of suspension insulators from their clapboard prison. What it's like to become excited about a rotten old pole lying on its side; excited because of what is still screwed onto those little pegs on the crossarm. Or what it's like to come across an old electrical station buried in the woods, rusty bits of broken wire still clinging to soot-covered brown things.

If insulators could talk, they could tell us stories to last a lifetime! Help them talk. Help them tell their stories. TELL people about your insulators. A collector could be born!