The Man From Swan Lake - A Hero of The Cocoanut Grove Nightclub Fire: The Clifford Johnson Story Hardcover – August 4, 2025

The Man From Swan Lake - A Hero of The Cocoanut Grove Nightclub Fire The Clifford Johnson Story is a novel of historical fiction based upon the life of twenty-one year old Coast Guardsman, Clifford Allison Johnson, a burn survivor of the Coconut Grove Nightclub fire in the Bay Village section of Boston on the night of Saturday, November 28, 1942; a fire that took the lives of 490 people.'Cliffy' Johnson became a hero in that terrible conflagration when he entered the nightclub several times to rescue other patrons. In the process, he received burns over 40% of his body.It was his good fortune and blessing that Coast Guardsman Johnson was evacuated to Boston City Hospital where they had just established a "Burn Unit" in expectation that the hospital would be receiving burn casualties from the war raging in Europe and the Pacific. Little did they realize the Burn Unit's baptism of fire would be born from a homegrown tragedy?Cliffy Johnson's life hung in the balance every minute, every hour, and every day as his massive burns exposed his body to every imaginable infection. He remained at 'City' for nearly a year. Eventually, the heroic doctors on the Burn Team performed successfully some of the world's first skin grafts of Clifford Johnson.In time, Cliffy Johnson, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Charles " Lucky" Lindbergh would return to his hometown of Sumner, Missouri home of the country's largest swan and geese preserve, Swan Lake.Soon, he would be hired as Swan Lake's Game Warden where his life would play out like that of Prince Siegfried and his beloved Princess Odette in Tchaikovsky's ballet, Swan Lake.As Clifford Johnson would say of his beautiful Swan Lake, " Nothin' really dies here; it just comes back more beautiful than before...'Clifford Johnson was truly 'the man from Swan Lake.' Read more