Daniel Dale Johnston was born January 22, 1961 in the Sacramento Hospital in Sacramento, CA, to Bill and Mabel Johnston and brought to their home on 5119 Tuscon Circle, Fair Oaks, CA. (They lived nearby in Fair Oaks, CA.) He was a late addition to the family, 5th child and born 7 years after his nearest sibling, Dick. Throughout his life, Daniel repeatedly mentioned that he shared a birthday with Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), but he was mistaken. Lewis Carroll’s birthday was actually January 27th.
His first word was “eye.” Or “I.” He always said that the two terms were interchangeable and that he meant both things. Dick told me he also had a security blanket when he was very young and would say “I want my eye/I!” In “A Year in My Garden”1 diary entries, Daniel often conflated the two words (as in “Eye want you, Eye love you, etc.”)
- “A Year in My Garden” is a gardening book turned diary that each of the Johnston children wrote in, but that Daniel wrote in the most, by far. It’s also a great artifact of Daniel’s progress as a young artist. In particular, he drew Frankenstein repeatedly, getting better and better from year to year. Mabel monitored this diary and sometimes edited or censored entries that were not to her liking. ↩︎