Despite detours, Life's path led Christine Johnson Where She was Meant to Be: Coronado

By Ivy Weston Eckenroth Publications Staff Writer

Christine Johnson went to journalism school, but didn’t make it her career until later in life.

Johnson is a staff writer who pens weekly pieces for the Coronado Eagle & Journal and a popular monthly feature about cocktails in Coronado Magazine – both publications under the umbrella of local publishing company Eckenroth Publications.

While earning her journalism degree from Georgia Southern, she wrote for the school newspaper and also had a radio show. “I really did more radio than writing,” she laughs. Curiously, her daughter Sammy Johnson has a radio show at Chapman University, where she is entering her junior year. She didn’t do it to emulate her mom, but because she needed an elective and saw it in the course catalog.

Christine, who grew up in both Florida and Georgia, left both journalism and broadcasting behind after graduating from college, instead choosing a career in corporate communications. One day, she read a People magazine story that changed her life.

“They had a feature story about a doctor who had a program in the Florida Keys where he worked with special-needs children in the water with dolphins,” she says. “At the time, I volunteered on the weekends at a children’s hospital. They had a program that prepped children who were going to have surgery. The idea was to walk them around the hospital to the areas they would see before, during and after surgery so that when the day of their surgery came, they wouldn’t be scared. So when I saw that in the magazine, I went ‘Oh my god, I’m going to go down and see this guy.’”

It was called the Dolphin Research Center, and she and her brother jumped in the car and drove from Atlanta to the Keys. Christine, a self-described Type-A personality, “literally barged in and said ‘Can I see Dr Dave?’”

Dr. Dave told her that she came at the right time because the program was expanding tenfold and he needed someone to do marketing and PR and to set up an internship program. Three weeks later, she moved to the Keys and worked at the Dolphin Research Center for the next 15 years.

It remains one of the happiest periods of her life. Dolphins are extremely intelligent, gentle animals who are very intuitive when it comes to humans.

“You put a child with cerebral palsy, which is a physical disability, in the water, vs. someone in the water with no physical disability, the dolphins are going to roam around you and do things normally – but with a child with cerebral palsy, their approach is slow and easy, and they echolocate to figure out what’s wrong,” she says, adding that she still goes to the Keys every summer for two weeks to swim with the dolphins and visit with Dr. Dave.

Christine was so into her career that dating was never a big priority, and she enjoyed being independent. Then at age 38 she met – or more accurately, re-met – her husband Chris.

“Our two families grew up together. His dad was our pediatrician. He was eight years older than me, so I grew up with his two younger brothers. I’ll bet I met him twice, maybe,” Christine says. “When I was 38, his brother, who I grew up with, was getting married. Chris came to the wedding, had just gotten divorced. When I walked into the rehearsal, he was standing with my parents and his, and I walked in with a friend and he was like, ‘Who is that?’ And my mom said ‘That’s Chrissy’ -- that’s what everyone called me, which I hate – and he said, ‘What?! No. That kid? That can’t be!’”

It literally was love at first sight. She lived in Florida, he lived in Arizona. They did the long-distance thing for six months, and then she moved to Arizona. Chris had been married for 24 years and had kids who were graduating from high school. Christine felt nervous to bring up talk of kids, but had to tell him she wanted to have one child before she got too old. He responded with “No problem.”

They had their daughter, Sammy, when Christine was 41. The couple bought a vacation home in Coronado which they had for 12 years. They fell in love with Coronado and came here in the summers when Sammy was on school break. Sammy was seven when her parents bought the house.

“Our daughter could get on her bike and ride around, she could have all her friends over to the house, when they went up to Mootime to get ice cream I didn’t feel nervous about it,” Christine said.

Then life took an unexpected turn for the family.

“We always were going to retire here. That was our game plan. And then Chris got sick with cancer, and he passed away six years ago,” Christine said. “He was sick really quickly, came out of nowhere, it was stage 4 melanoma when they found it. When he was diagnosed they gave him six months, and he lived two years. For the most part, those two years were a good quality of life. We came here a lot because he loved it here, it was peaceful.”

Chris asked Christine to promise him one thing.

“Over the last couple days of his life we sat and did nothing but talk, and he was like ‘please promise me you and Sammy are going to Coronado. That’s where you were meant to be, that’s where we wanted to be, and I’ll be there with you.’” She promised, and Chris is here with them. He was buried on Coronado.

As much as she mourned her husband, Christine was more concerned with Sammy, who was only 14 when her dad passed away.

“But you know what? After the shock, my daughter and I got together and we said ‘OK, we’re a team, and we’re going to continue with what we planned as a family. You graduate from high school in Arizona, and we’re going to Coronado.’ Because she was always going to go to a California school, she’s totally a West Coast girl.”

Christine sold the vacation home, which was too big and had too many memories, and built another, two blocks away. As soon as Sammy graduated from high school, the two moved to Coronado in 2020.

“I give Sammy amazing credit, because she was 14 and lost her dad in a terrible way, watched him be very sick, but she was one of those kids that decided it wasn’t going to define her and she was going to take something tragic and make something really good,” Christine said.

Now in her junior year of college, Sammy wants to go into medicine.

“She’s a sports fanatic, and she wants to be that physio person that runs out on the field at an NFL game after the player snaps

his knee,” Christine says. “When we watch football together and something happens to someone, she’s like ‘OK, I’ve gotta pause that and go back,’ and I’m like ‘Oh my God, no! Why do you want to see him twist his knee?’ and she’s like ‘Well, he just tore his so-and-so ligament.’ That would be her dream job.”

Moving to Coronado led to Christine’s current gig.

“I opened up the Eagle one day and I saw an ad for a writer in the wanted ads. And I went, ‘Huh. I actually would kind of like at least checking into that.’ So I interviewed with both Deans [Eckenroth Senior and Junior], and we totally hit it off. I think Dean Sr. and I sat in his office for I don’t know how long, talking community and politics and everything. It was just something that was meant to be.”

She started out very part-time but has since gotten more involved because she loves it.

“I do a lot of community pieces. I’ve turned out to be the feature writer for the Coronado Police Department. It shows them as human beings, not just people in uniform. I love doing those features, because they are some of the nicest people I have ever met, and they truly love this community,” she says.

She also enjoys the cocktails feature she does monthly for Coronado Magazine. She has creative freedom and usually chooses a cocktail that goes with the magazine’s monthly theme, such as the Fourth of July. Unlike writing straight news for the Eagle, the magazine feature allows her to write in her own voice, which she really enjoys.

Christine has fond memories of the Eckenroth Publications offices from before she lived here permanently.

“When we had our vacation home, their office was in the little white house on 10th. My daughter did the Pet Photo Contest one year, and won in her category,” with a photo featuring the family dog, Christine says. “The Pet Photo Contest is going on now, and Sammy asked ‘Can I enter?’ and I said ‘Well, now you can’t because I work for Eckenroth!’ But it’s funny how some things lead you down a strange path.”

Now Mom is thriving on Coronado, and Sammy is thriving, too, despite her father’s death.

“She doesn’t talk about it much at all,” Christine observes. “We’ve talked about therapy, I’ve tried to talk to her just the two of us, and she’s like ‘Mom, I’m OK. Everything I do is going to make dad proud and I know that’s what he wanted.’”

Sammy now has a full plate at school, taking 18 credit hours this semester along with playing soccer, her radio show, and her sorority. Perhaps the most important activity to her is being vice president of fundraising for the American Cancer Society at Chapman in honor of her dad.

For her part, Christine is enjoying her independence, her job, and Coronado living.

“I love being part of the paper because I love being part of this community. The paper has given me the opportunity to go behind the scenes if you will, and meet people that are incredible and are here for a reason and love what they do: the police officers, the fire department, the shop owners. It’s given me the opportunity to love this place even more, if that’s possible,” she says. “Whenever I think about moving away for whatever reason - say my daughter graduates and moves away - I think to myself, is there a better place to live than this? Where I can ride my bike wherever I want, if I forget to lock my doors I’m not going to lose sleep over it. There’s just not a better place to live.”