Angels Among Us

Unlikely Friendship Blossoms Amidst a Crisis

Rebecca Johnson had had better days. It was December 2017, and the spunky retiree didn’t feel right. An emergency call was made, and the ambulance personnel arrived to find her in bed. An EMT introduced himself as James Pinkston; he sat down next to her on the bed and asked her questions about her condition in soft, soothing tones.

“I kept lifting my arms,” Johnson remembers. “James said, ’Why are you lifting your arms?’ I said, ’I don’t know. They feel funny.’ He said, ’Let’s go out and get you in the truck, and let’s see.’ “Got into the truck and he did some testing, and he said, ’Miss Rebecca, you have had a heart attack and are currently having one at this moment.’ I just looked at him, and I said, ’So, what the hell are we doing sitting in the parking lot, James? Let’s get to the hospital.’”

It was a short ride to Baxter Health; Johnson lives across the street, and were she in an apartment on the other side of her building she could look out her window and see the hospital. But in the time it took to drive the few yards to the ER, a remarkable friendship was born.

“It was the first time I had ever had any problems and the first time I had ever called 911,” Johnson said. “Dr. Michael Camp came in, and I had stents put in. Then I went back in a couple of weeks and had more stents put in.”

Three months later, while on her way to the grocery store, Johnson saw an ambulance in the parking lot. Feeling moved to thank them for their service to the community, she approached and was startled to see Pinkston sitting behind the wheel.

“Without me saying anything, he looked at me and jumped out of the truck and said, ’Miss Rebecca, I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again,’ and hugged me through my window,” she said.

A Life of Ambition, Adaptability, and Service to Community at 82, Rebecca Johnson has lived a colorful life that has generated many friends and acquaintances. Conversation is an easy art form for her and a trait she comes by honestly as the daughter of a politician, her mother, who was elected to the city council of Inglewood, California. “That was back in the early ’50s when women were just sealing envelopes and putting the stamps on them,” she said. “Then she ran for city clerk and was elected, and that’s where she retired from.”

Imbued with a similarly ambitious nature, Johnson was on her way to law school when she detoured into a career. Over time she’d be a commodities trader for Conagra through the Chicago Board of Trade and a highly successful agent and sales manager for Prudential Insurance. In her 40s, during a period living in Omaha, Nebraska, she also went back to night school. Balancing her career and the demands of raising her son on her own, she attended the University of Nebraska Omaha where she regularly had a spot on the Dean’s List.

Johnson landed permanently in Arkansas in 2003 when she and her then-husband were on an RV tour of points of interest around the United States.

“We ran across Mountain Home, Arkansas, after reading about it being one of the top places to retire in the country,” she said. “We were on our way to Branson, took a hard right and came to Mountain Home. We looked at each other and said maybe this is the place for us.”

Once landing here full time, Johnson started looking around for things to do. Life in the RV hadn’t given her much opportunity to give back to a community, and she was eager to enroll in volunteering.

“(Volunteering) was a big part of my life growing up, giving service to people,” she said. “I had volunteered for Mountain Home Food Basket; I was treasurer there for about three years. I also helped with Serenity, which is an organization that takes care of abused women and their children, and I have volunteered at the hospital. I did that for about a year, working in the gift shop. I just like to do my part.”

After her heart episode, Johnson’s health issues would flare up now and again as they tend to do in someone now 82 years old. Each time she’d arrive for treatment, she’d always work in the same question, ’Do you happen to know James Pinkston?’ Invariably the answer was yes, and she’d learn a little more about him. Last December, five years to the month of her heart attack, she had trouble breathing and faced another short ambulance ride to Baxter Health.

“They loaded me on the gurney and took me to the truck. I’m lying there and I said, as I always do, ’Do you happen to know James Pinkston?’” she said. “This guy turned around and he said, ’That’s me.’ I didn’t recognize him. “I said to him, ’James, I have followed your career; I know that you left the EMT business and went to nursing school and you became a nurse, and then you went back to the EMT part of the hospital, and you are working back there again.’ He said, ’I can’t believe that you have followed me all this time.’ I said, ’Yes I have because I consider the fact that you saved my life a few years ago.’”

Johnson, who’d be diagnosed with pneumonia and COVID, had one more surprise in store that day. Pinkston visited her room where the two chatted for a spell. When he finally got up to leave, he left behind a care package with a fluffy blanket and a card that read, in part, “Knowing that the little things that we do for the community, including beautiful people like you, is what keeps us going. It is so rare that we hear the words ’Thank you.’ I will never forget your kindness.”

“We all neglect to thank the people that we rely on,” Johnson said. “We’re always told to make sure you thank the servicemen for their service, but there are lots of other people that need a thank you — EMT drivers, teachers, a myriad of people. James is just someone so very special to me.”