Carnation Fourth of July Grand Marshals look back on 40 years in the city

Published 8:30 am Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Residents of Carnation for over 40 years, Tod and Linda Johnson have been named Grand Marshals of the Carnation Fourth of July parade.

Tod and Linda are active community members and business owners in Carnation. They own and operate the Carnation Storage Center, Tolt Laundry Company, and have built many apartment buildings in the city.

Both Tod and Linda made their way to Carnation from very different places. Tod grew up in Alaska and came to Washington to work for Boeing after getting out of the Navy. Linda grew up in the south before moving to Carnation in 1973.

“I was raised in the south, Oklahoma and Arkansas and lived in California for a while,” Linda said. “I’ve always been a country girl, my grandparents had a farm and I loved it.”

Once he moved to Carnation, Tod left Boeing and started a local construction company. Since then he has had a hand in many developments in the city.

“In 1973, I started Sno-Valley Construction in Carnation. Since then we’ve built almost 90 percent of all the multi-family homes, Tolt Town Center, which is the main shopping center in town, and then we built Carnation Storage Center and the laundromat,” he said. “We also built Monroe Laundry in Monroe and Snohomish Laundry in Snohomish.”

Tod and Linda met through the choir of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in 1983. Tod already had six children and Linda had three when they were married in 1987. They raised their children together in Carnation, building a house for their family of 11.

“What woman is going to want to marry a guy with six kids? I thought that ain’t gonna happen, but that never became an issue and we built our own house on Griffin Creek,” Tod said. “We bought the property in 1985, started construction in 1986 and moved in 1992.”

As he reminisced on the construction of their home, Tod explained the family had to live in a garage for three and a half years during the development and they had all the kids working on small construction tasks.

Construction wasn’t the only thing Tod was involved in. He also served on Carnation’s first Planning Commission and on the King County Library Board from 1970 to 1982.

“Part of our gig was to be involved in the community. This is a great place to raise a family,” he said.

Linda is also very active in the community as the music director for St. Anthony’s and as a singer in a local group called Los Orchids, which will also be performing during the Fourth festivities.

“Anything musical that goes through St. Anthony’s goes across my desk,” she said.

Carnation has been a home to the Johnsons for more than 40 years and they have worked to help preserve and promote the values of the town, Tod said.

While cities in the Valley have seen massive growth and change, the Johnsons believe Carnation has been able to maintain its core values while bringing new people in.

“The new people that are coming are bringing the mentality that we brought when we came here,” he said. “Carnation is always going to be small because of the geography of the Valley. It’s going to be a small community and the bigger communities will grow up around it. We have the opportunity to make Carnation the gem of the Eastside.”

Linda explained that their businesses in the city were meant to complement the current Carnation, rather than moving away from the small town feel.

“It was to complement it, to add to it, not to change it but just to magnify the beautify of what this Valley has and what this town has,” she said.

Their construction of apartments in the city has helped address the growing concern about affordable housing in the Valley as well.

“There were virtually no apartments when we came here and we built 90 percent of the apartments here,” Linda said “It was fundamentally so that the people that were raised here didn’t have to move and they could afford to live here.”

After raising nine children and watching 17 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren grow up in Carnation, the Johnsons said their love for the city has only deepened.

“Let’s honor what we have, let it shine,” Linda said. “Let’s not trying morph it into something else that everybody else has, let’s respect it and honor it and let it shine the way it is and people will be drawn to that.”