Victor Johnson poses with his new book, “Who We Were,” which tells 16 stories, detailing everything from personal friendships and a lovable horse to his personal pain with his wife’s nine-year battle with Alzheimer’s.

What do you do if you are 88 years old and your head is full of stories?

Well, in the case of long-time Blue Earth area resident Victor Johnson, you write them down and publish them as a book.

The book, titled “Who We Were,” just came out last week. But the stories included in it have been years in the making.

“I always loved stories,” Johnson says. “I have enjoyed hearing stories and I have loved telling stories.”

Even when he was just a little boy, Johnson would listen to stories told by his father (Joseph Johnson), his grandfather (Ole Johnson) and his great uncle, Jens Johnson.

And, he remembered the stories and enjoyed retelling them, as well as many of his own.

“For quite a few years I was a member of the Story-Tellers Guild in Austin and Albert Lea,” Johnson says. “Their motto was ‘Everyone has a story to tell.’ It was there that I realized I had family stories that other people seemed interested to hear my family stories.”

Then, at the urging of his children, he wrote about five of them down in 2004 and printed them off on a copier and gave them to his kids and grandkids.

In 2011, when he was 81 and says he finally realized he was getting old, he decided to start writing even more of them down.

The result is his first book. It contains 16 chapters, each one of them a short story along with a prologue and an epilogue.

The stories are not in chronological order, are not directly related to each other, and are generally only about 10 pages long.

“I kept it Reader’s Digest style,” Johnson says. “And I tried to give each one a meaningful ending.”

While many deal with his family, ancestors and old friends, they contain some history of Faribault County and life as it was in the pioneer days and is now in modern times.

There are a couple of chapters devoted to Johnson’s ancestors who came as pioneers to Faribault County and homesteaded here.

A chapter is devoted to dealings with a local banker. Another tells all about the Dell Store (which had nothing to do with computers, Johnson says with a smile) and the two character brothers who ran it.

Another chapter deals with a horse named Shoney which acted as though he thought he was a person, not a horse.

“People tell me that one should be turned into a children’s book,” Johnson laughs. “Maybe I will sometime.”

There is a chapter devoted to his long-time best friend, Adorphus (Duffy) Erdahl, entitled “What Would Duffy Do?”

A chapter titled “Forced Landing” deals with long-time pilot Johnson’s surviving a bad flight. A really bad flight.

And then there is the deeply personal chapter entitled simply “Eulogy,” which deals with his first wife’s nine-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

“I think this chapter can have some real meaning to anyone who is facing having a loved one with this type of disease,” Johnson says. “After I wrote it I had to put it up on a shelf for a long time. It was too painful to read again.”

Johnson has had a very interesting life, to say the least.

“I grew up in the house that my great-grandfather, Ole Iverson, built after he had first built a sod house, then a log cabin, on the land he had homesteaded,” Johnson says. “Then in 1954 I bought the house my grandfather, Ole Johnson, had built.”

That was after Johnson had graduated from Blue Earth High School in 1946 and had received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Minnesota College of Agriculture, Forestry and Home Economics in April of 1950.

And, it was after he had married Irene (Rene) Christianson in 1950. They had four children; Pamela Renee, Dana Jerome, Matthew Conrad and Jayson Christian.

For 17 years, Johnson was a farmer on his grandfather’s farm that he now owned. His wife, Rene, was a kindergarten teacher in Delavan and Blue Earth.

“She was the one who urged me to get an advanced degree, after she had gotten her masters degree,” he says. “And it was my idea to become a lawyer.”

So, at age 36, and with money tight, he began night law school at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. He commuted back and forth from the farm to St. Paul for four years to get his Juris Doctor degree.

He says it took 25,000 miles (about the same distance around the Earth at the equator) to become a lawyer. The law firm he partnered with was Putnam, Spencer and Johnson. After the death of the senior partner it became Spencer, Johnson and Richards.

Johnson retired from the practice of law when he turned 65.

Meanwhile, living in the house his grandfather Ole Johnson had built, Vic and Rene Johnson dreamed of building a new home on the spot.

In 1966, that dream came true and they built their new home to accommodate their family and Irene’s mother, Ann Christianson.

Unfortunately, in 1996, Irene was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It was not the only tragedy to befall the family that year, as the dream house the Johnson’s had designed and built themselves, burned to the ground.

With the help of family and friends, Vic Johnson rebuilt the home while also tending to Irene.

After a nine-year battle, Irene Johnson died in 2004.

Vic Johnson married Eleanor Lindeman and they lived together at the farm for six years, before moving to a townhome in Inver Grove Heights in 2012.

“I sold the two family homes that year, too,” Johnson says, just a bit choked up. “Just the building sites, not the whole farms. But, for the first time since 1861, a portion of that original homestead was owned by persons not related to my great-grandfather, Ole Iverson.

And, in case you are having a little trouble figuring out how Johnson has a great-grandfather named Ole Iverson, and a grandfather named Ole Johnson, you can read the first couple of chapters in the book.

It is a great story. Basically, his great-grandfather?Ole Iverson homesteaded the land first.

But, his grandfather, Ole Johnson, was walking the 12 miles from Wells to Frost, when he smelled fresh baked bread at the Iverson farm.

Long story short, he stayed around and eventually married Ole Iverson’s second youngest daughter.

And built a house just down the road. A house that eventually would become his grandson’s.

In case you want to purchase a copy of Vic Johnson’s book, “Who We Were,” you can do so by sending a check for $14.50 for the book and $5 for postage and handling to Books/Victor Johnson, 6453 Burnham Circle, Inver Grove Heights, MN, 55076.

He would be happy to send you one.

And when you receive it, you might want to check out Chapter 15. It is entitled “The Story From My Love Life That I Never Told My Wife.”

Now, talk about a tell-all book, this one has it all.