Every winter when they were kids, Anna Ruby and Jason Johns would hop in their dad’s truck and drive to downtown Kalispell with a trunk full of wreaths and garlands.  

The trip was always made in the evening; the sun had gone down and only streetlights illuminated the falling snow. 

Anna and Jason’s father, Daniel ‘Dan’ Johns, was a coach and president of the local Pee Wee Baseball league. He brought along his kids and a few other teammates to walk up and down Main Street, dressing the city up in holiday spirit.   

“It was really magical,” Anna Ruby remembered. “We were doing something special.”  

To those who knew him, giving was the attribute that best embodied Dan Johns, 79, who died Sept. 3 in Hillsboro, Oregon. Born and raised in Kalispell, Johns was an active member of the community for years, playing an influential role in creating the newly renamed Dan Johns Kalispell Youth Athletic Complex as well as the Miracle Field for children with disabilities.   

When it came to buying things for himself, he was an overthinker.  

“He suffered from analysis paralysis,” Jason Johns laughed. “But when it came to giving to other people, he felt in his element.”  

That was why his children say Dan Johns was relentless in leading the years-long effort to build the complex, which now houses over 30 different playing surfaces and welcomes thousands of children and their families every year. 

Johns always had a love for baseball. He grew up playing Pee Wee, Babe Ruth and Legion Ball in town. He even went on to pitch for the Oles at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, earning himself MVP in 1967, according to his obituary published in the Inter Lake. 

“Dan was Mr. Baseball,” said Roy Beekman, a board member for the nonprofit Kidsports, which manages the fields.  

Johns eventually coached and became president of the Pee Wee league he grew up playing in each season. Beekman’s son was in the league at the time, and he got roped into helping coach around 1988. He and Johns sometimes coached with each other, and sometimes against.  

But when they worked together, their conflicting personalities paired well. While Beekman was more of an act first think second kind of guy, Johns was soft-spoken and “very methodical. He didn’t do anything quickly,” Beekman said. “It was a good mix.”  

Mayor Mark Johnson, who got to know Johns through the North Valley Hospital board, invited him to coach Pee Wee Majors alongside him.  

“He was extremely patient and willing to give time to develop a player with an interest in the game,” Johnson said.  

Jason Johns, who was coached by his father when he was 10, said he tries to mimic his father when coaching his own Little League team in Oregon.   

BEFORE THE Kidsports Complex, Kalispell’s fields were scattered across town. The city needed a dedicated space for kids to congregate and compete.  

Dan Johns helped form the nonprofit Kidsports, which helped leverage a lease agreement in 1997 between the city and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation to designate 138 acres for youth athletic fields.  

Renewing the lease grew too costly, though. Johns eventually negotiated a permanent lease with the state agency in 2013. 

Along with lots of baseball memorabilia, Jason Johns remembered his father's office was always laden with maps and blueprints related to the sports complex.  

While Dan Johns was travelling around the country observing other athletic complexes and negotiating with stakeholders, he was also a full-time labor lawyer.  

“I don’t know how he did that,” Ruby said, adding that he never made apparent all the responsibilities he was juggling.  

He would never want to take individual credit for his achievements either, she said. “But he is the one who put all the pieces together." 

The day before Johns died, the two played the Sept. 2 Kalispell City Council meeting over the speakers so their father could hear councilors vote to rename the Kidsports Complex after him.    

“At the time he was not responsive to a lot,” Jason Johns said. “My hope is that somewhere in there he did [hear].” 

WITHIN THE athletic complex sits another brainchild of Johns, the Miracle Field. The rubber-topped baseball field was created for players with mental or physical disabilities. It was first of its kind in the western U.S. when it opened in 2009.  

Jennifer Johnson, who has been director for the program since 2020 and coached since the league’s first season, said Johns would always keep an extra ball in his back pocket and pretend to tag her son, who has autism, while he ran around the bases.  

“He and my son had a really amazing relationship” Johnson said. “He was just incredible and patient and kind. He’s irreplaceable.”  

Dan Johns was friends with everyone in town, and everyone was friends with him, his children said.  

“We became accustomed to standing there with our dad waiting for him to stop talking to someone, because he’s so kind and would stop and just make sure he got an update on them and let them know he cared about them,” Ruby recalled.  

Each year around Thanksgiving the Pee Wee team delivered wreaths to homes around the Flathead Valley. Ruby remembered as a kid spending all day driving around with her father but not delivering many wreaths.  

“We’d go way out to West Valley, deliver a wreath and stay and talk for 45 minutes,” she laughed. “It was just a whole day of driving all over the valley delivering wreaths to people who were really happy to see us, and he would, of course, take the time to get caught up with them."  

At the end of the day Ruby, Jason Johns and their father would grab a bite to eat from the now-closed Arctic Circle, a burger joint on East Idaho Street. Ruby ordered the Lime Rickey soda with a hamburger and fries. Her brother got his usual strawberry milkshake.  

Ruby didn’t recall what her dad ordered, but said it probably would have been a chocolate shake.  

“He had a real sweet tooth,” she said. 

Reporter Jack Underhill can be reached at 758-4407 and [email protected].