Editor's note: The Great Recession, which hit Elkhart County hard, is over and the economy is rebounding. Right? That's what some experts say, though occasional economic turbulence and local unemployment of 9 percent sometimes make it hard to believe. In this four-day series, Thursday through Sunday, the Elkhart Truth revisits a few of the many people hit by the economic downturn with whom we've spoken to see how they're now faring. Read what they said, then and now.

The series was done in conjunction with the British newspaper The Guardian. Reporters from the newspaper visited Elkhart in 2008 and again over the summer to gauge the local fallout of the recession and the impact of President Obama's economic reform efforts.

Read Part 1, the Gonyon family's story, here.

Read Part 2, Ed Neufeldt's story, here.

Read Part 4, Umeki Williams' story, here.


ELKHART — Craig Johnson is keeping busy.

And, as always, he's upbeat, with a smile on his face.

Lately, he's been working on power generators used by the Indiana Toll Road system — that's what he does, services, sells and installs generators — and it keeps him moving.

“Sometimes it's feast or famine,” he says after a day of hard work. “Like right now, with the heat” — this was when the mercury here reached into the 90s and 100s earlier this summer, conditions that tax generators — “it's a feast.”

Of course it wasn't always like that.

Back in the depths of the Great Recession, on June 16, 2008, he was laid off from the job he had held for nine years. He had been at a company that manufactured generators for the recreational vehicle industry, which took a turn for the worse when the economy went south.

For over a year he looked for work, without success — the case for many here, where the annualized unemployment rate reached 18 percent in 2009. Things were grim, and then his wife, Kathy, was laid off from her job.

Among many other penny-pinching tactics, the Johnsons relied on dented canned goods, a bit cheaper than the unscathed ones, and thrift-store goods. He sold his “toys,” like a prized motorcycle.

Through it all, though, Johnson, a big outgoing guy who describes himself as independent, made it a point to keep upbeat. He knew that if he was going to survive this thing, this recession, he had to keep his head on straight, had to stay positive, had to maintain focus, had to pull himself up by the bootstraps.

Back in April 2009, in the depths of it all, he said that if you don't maintain a sense of humor “you'll just get lost in the hate and the desperation.”

Eventually, Johnson actually landed a job. The work environment was hostile, though, and he quit. No way did he give up, and he ended up launching his own company in the latter part of 2009, RV Owner Tech Source, service, selling, servicing and installing generators.

“I was one of those guys — I don't take failure so easy,” he says now. “Unemployment started my business.”

FILL A NICHE

The key, he says, is doing what you like and trying to fill a void in the market. In his case, Johnson knows generators, and he found that though there are plenty of generators out there on the market, there aren't many people who can fix them. “You have to find your passion, find a niche and go from there,” he says.

There are still dry patches, uncertainty, but of late, he's getting all his bills paid each month. He's hanging in there. “You can't run from fear. You use your fear as a motivator — it'll have to work,” he says, citing the attitude he learned in his years with the U.S. Air Force.

Along the way, he gives out-of-work acquaintances part-time jobs when he can, because he knows what it can be like. He and his wife are talking about launching some sort of online venture, because he knows that in this day and age, you have to seize your opportunities, try everything.

“It's never going to come back to where it was,” Johnson says. “I think the large, forever corporate jobs are not going to be there.”

Still, opportunity can come knocking. In the course of doing a job with his new company, he got a lead on a full-time job in Fort Wayne with a firm in the power generator field. He ultimately turned it down, figuring he wanted to make a go of the new business, which in October turns three.

He's even got some ideas for a new type of generator and tinkers with friends on the plans in his spare time. Maybe this winter he'll dig more deeply into the project.

“I'm just having too much fun,” he says. “I'm going to keep plugging away at it.”