Johnny Bryant

Johnny Paul Bryant lived a life defined by resourcefulness, craftsmanship, and an unshakable belief that anything worth doing was worth over engineering. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 5th, 1948, baptized at Ruhama Baptist Church, and graduated from Woodlawn High School, where he sang with the Warblers — a fact he mentioned just often enough that we suspect he was pretty proud of it.

He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from UAB in 1972. After unexpectedly flunking his Air Force enlistment physical (a result he accepted with remarkable grace), he headed to Mississippi State for a Master’s degree. There he built scale models of concrete fortresses and studied the impact behavior of early bunker busting prototypes — which is to say, he got a graduate degree in blowing things up on purpose. His favorite grad school story involved a course called Wave Motion Through Continuous Mediums and a textbook so thin it could have doubled as a coaster.

After finishing his degree, he loaded everything he owned into his Chevy Vega — a car that was basically a metal shrug on wheels — and drove to St. Paul, Minnesota, to begin a lifelong career with 3M. He spent his early years traveling to nearly all the lower 48 states installing license plate production equipment in prisons. He got to know stewardesses and flight tables of multiple airlines and spent so little time in his own bed that he offered it freely to friends and coworkers who were also living out of suitcases. Johnny was the only man we know who could be considered a frequent flyer on his own mattress.

As the 1970s drew to a close, he met and married Donna Louise Durgin at her parents’ home in North Carolina. They had two children, Adam and Ben, and he was gently encouraged to find a job that didn’t require a map, a suitcase, and a stack of boarding passes. After one particularly brutal Minnesota snowstorm, during which he sweated through his down parka while shoveling snow and clearing the roof, he decided to leave the state by any means necessary. Luckily, 3M offered him a transfer to a new facility in Austin, Texas, where snow was more of a rumor than a threat.

He led innovation teams focused on static control products, opto-electronics packaging, and amorphous materials fabrication. If you’ve ever benefited from reflective license plates, adhesives, abrasives, or filtration masks, you may have been using a patented work of Johnny’s. His love of all things mechanical didn’t stop when he got home. Johnny “dabbled” in military surplus equipment, especially generators. He claimed it was a side business, but everyone knew it was really an excuse to teach his sons small engine repair, the value of hard work, and the importance of never throwing away anything that might someday be useful. The driveway became their classroom, workshop, and occasional fire hazard.

A Celebration of Life will be held at Ridout's Trussville Chapel, located at 1500 Gadsden Hwy, Birmingham, Alabama, 35235. The service is scheduled for January 3, 2026, starting at 3:00 pm.