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Rafer Johnson

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Also known as Rafer Lewis Johnson

American athlete and actor (1934–2020)

OverviewAI-generated

Rafer Johnson was an American male author and musician. Born in 1935, he passed away on December 2, 2020. His physical measurements were recorded as a height of 190 and a mass of 91.

As a writer, Johnson is associated with three works, including *Great athletes* and *The best that I can be*. In the music field, he performed in genres such as 27 club, acoustic blues, american, blues, and country blues.

Synthesized by Vinony from 16 facts across 5 sources: Wikidata, Open Library, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born
1935
Works
3

Top works

  • Great athletes
  • Great athletes
  • The best that I can be

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Male
Origin
United States
Active from
1911-05-08
Active to
1938-08-16
27 clubacoustic bluesamericanbluescountry bluesdelta blues

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

  1. DADA2: High-resolution sample inference from Illumina amplicon data

    · 2016 · cited 32,916x

  2. Geant4—a simulation toolkit

    · 2003 · cited 21,297x

  3. Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome

    · 2001 · cited 18,622x

  4. Optical Constants of the Noble Metals

    · 1972 · cited 18,252x

  5. Model-based Analysis of ChIP-Seq (MACS)

    · 2008 · cited 17,885x

via Crossref · CC0

Key facts

Full name
Rafer Lewis Johnson
Born
( 1934-08-18 ) August 18, 1934, Hillsboro, Texas , U.S.
Died
December 2, 2020 (2020-12-02) (aged 86), Sherman Oaks , California , U.S.
Height
6 ft 3 in (1.90 m)
Weight
201 lb (91 kg)
Spouse
Elizabeth Thorsen ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1971 ) ​
Sport
Athletics
Event
Decathlon
Club
Southern California Striders, Anaheim
Personal best s
100 m – 10.3 (1957), 220 yd – 21.0 (1956), 400 m – 47.9 (1956), 110 mH – 13.8 (1956), HJ – 1.89 m (1955), PV – 4.09 m (1960), LJ – 7.76 m (1956), SP – 16.75 m (1958), DT – 52.50 m (1960), JT – 76.73 m (1960), Decathlon – 8392 (1960)

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Instance of
human
Given name
Lewis
Family name
Johnson
Gender
male
Citizenship
United States
Place of birth
Hillsboro
Place of death
Sherman Oaks
Languages spoken
English language
Native language
English language
Country for sport
United States
Mass
91
Image
Rafer Johnson 1960.jpg
Height
190
Show 11 more facts
cause of death
stroke
date of birth
1935-08-18
Commons category
Rafer Johnson
sports discipline competed in
decathlon
member of
Peace Corps
date of death
2020-12-02
name in native language
Rafer Johnson
manner of death
natural causes
writing language
English language
on focus list of Wikimedia project
Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
Sources (6)

via Wikidata · CC0

~12 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Rafer Lewis Johnson (August 18, 1934 – December 2, 2020) was an American decathlete and film and television actor. He was the 1960 Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon, having won silver in 1956. He had previously won a gold at the 1955 Pan American Games. Johnson was the U.S. team's flag bearer at the 1960 Olympics and lit the Olympic cauldron at the 1984 Summer Olympics.

In 1968, Johnson, football player Rosey Grier, and journalist George Plimpton tackled Sirhan Sirhan moments after he had fatally shot Robert F. Kennedy.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Rafer Johnson” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.