Talk:Arte Johnson

quote
Very Interesting mention? --Panhan00 (talk) 19:23, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Place of birth
I am new to editing wikipedia articles, so please bear with me. The article states that Arte Johnson was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Googling "Arte Johnson Benton Harbor" provides hundreds of hits to support this claim (including imdb). I am from Benton Harbor, and I wanted to find evidence to support this claim. I subscribe to ancestrydotcom, so I began an in-depth search. First, there are no records for Arte or Arthur Johnson being born in Berrien County (home of Benton Harbor) in 1929. A search of Art* Johnson in the indexed library of the local newspaper provided no hits.

However, I did find one-year-old Arthur Johnson living in Chicago in the 1930 census with his parents Abraham and Edith Johnson. Abraham was a lawyer. But Arthur was born in Illinois, not Michigan. The 1940 census also shows Abraham and Edith and 11-year-old Arthur S. Johnson in Chicago. Again, Arthur was born in Illinois. Also living in this family in 1940 was 8-year-old Howard Johnson (more on him later). Finally, I found a birth certificate for a "baby boy Johnson" born Jan. 20, 1929 to Abraham Johnson (an attorney) and Edit Goldberg (not Golden), born at St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. I can provide all three documents upon request.

Then there is his brother "Coslough," mentioned in the article. A search of all 20 billion records in Ancestry produced not a single hit, not just for "Coslough Johnson," but for anyone born anywhere anytime named "Coslough." But I did find on the internet a page written by a relative of Arte Johnson that explains that Arte's brother changed his named from Howard to "Coslough" to avoid obvious name confusion. And that takes us back to the 1940 census where Howard appears as Arte's younger brother, confirming that the 1930 and 1940 censuses refer to our Arte Johnson.

So, what now? Arte Johnson himself has stated in interviews that he is from Benton Harbor, but there are no records to prove it, and several records to disprove it. How do you handle a situation where a celebrity may be misinformed of the facts of his own birth?

Chickadeebro (talk) 17:02, 20 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I'd suggest that you start by reading No original research, which covers your general question. More specifically, you haven't "proven" anything. Lots of people have no locatable birth records. Plus, Johnson is a very common last name, and none of their first names are particularly uncommon. (Plus the difference between Edythe Golden and Edith Goldberg actually undermines your hypothesis.) Maybe you've figured out that Arte was born in Chicago and the family later moved across the lake and told everyone (including the kids) that's where they'd always lived. Or maybe you're mistaken, and there was more than one Johnson family with similar names. We don't know. And WP policy says that, unless reliable sources have reported that "comedian Arte Johnson was born in Chicago", WP won't say that either, especially if multiple sources say differently. -Jason A. Quest (talk) 03:00, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Change of header template?
I see that the header considers Arte a living person, even though the article now includes his death date. When should the "recent death" template be used? JHVipond (talk) 19:02, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Korean War service
Although one source says "Following brief military service in Korea (he was discharged because of duodenal ulcer he’d suffered since childhood)", there are no reliable sources that says he served in Korea in the Korean War. More specifically, the sources do not establish defining role in the Korean War. Accordingly, "Category:United States army personnel of World War I" was removed until a defining role is established. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 14:10, 6 December 2023 (UTC)