Growing up in Brattleboro in the 1950s, Bob Johnson loved to plunder a local junkyard for car parts. He was a born tinkerer, obsessed with repairing broken things and solving problems others gave up on. He was also a natural entrepreneur. By age 14, he’d launched a successful business fixing up old beaters in his backyard and selling them for cash. It was the first in a long line of innovative ventures throughout his life.
A brilliant physicist and inventor, Bob saw things differently from most people — literally. In 1969, he launched Omega Optical in Brattleboro. The company creates lenses, optical coatings and filters for the likes of NASA and the Human Genome Project. His later pursuits, including Delta Vermont and Epsilon Spires, ran the gamut from environmental and educational work to fostering community through the arts and supporting aspiring entrepreneurs.
“I’ve never met anyone as accustomed to thinking outside of the box as Bob,” said Gary Goodemote, who worked for Bob for more than 40 years at another of his ventures, Friends of the Sun, an alternative energy company founded in the mid-’70s. “He brought creativity, intellect and a sense of long-range purpose to everything he pursued — and many people’s lives were better off for it.”
While his success with Omega changed the world, or at least how we look at it, Bob’s work focused closer to home was also impactful — and perhaps more meaningful to him. His friends and family would tell you that Bob was a townie at heart. He was born in Brattleboro and, on December 29, 2025, at age 80, Bob died there, in his home just down the road from the farm where he grew up.
“I don’t know if he really knew what an impact he had on the town,” said his daughter, Maryam Hadden. “When he died, he honestly wasn’t ready to go. It wasn’t about him not experiencing things, but rather his perspective was, I haven’t done enough.”
Bob was a gifted child of gifted parents. His father, also a farm boy from New England, was educated abroad and eventually became a theology professor at American University of Beirut. While on a boat traveling back to the Middle East from the New York World’s Fair in 1939, Bob Sr. met his future wife, Wanda, who was from Heliopolis, Egypt. They married at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo not long after. But as World War II loomed in Europe and northern Africa, American men overseas were encouraged to return home. And so the couple moved to southern Vermont.
They eventually established a 550-acre farm in West Brattleboro, where they raised three children: Colman, Robert Jr. and Carol. In this rural but intellectual setting, young Bob helped his father create contraptions such as a mechanized automatic feeder for the family’s large stock of chicken and sheep.
While still in high school, Bob became an assistant to family friend and physicist Edgar Barr, who had taught with Robert Sr. in Beirut and worked on the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the atomic bomb. Barr was also a pioneer in optics. Under his tutelage, Bob learned how to develop goggles with thin films that protect the eyes during bomb-blast tests — a far cry from souping up Jaguars in his backyard.
Bob studied physics at Marlboro College in the mid-’60s while continuing to work with Barr in Boston. But the Vietnam War was on the horizon, and Bob was determined not to be drafted. So he headed to Canada to settle near Cape Breton with his first wife, Margo, and their pets.
Before heading north, Bob spent months raiding Boston junkyards. With the skills he developed scavenging car parts as a kid, Bob used the high-tech refuse to construct the first optical lenses and machines for his fledgling business, Omega Optical.
Many of those first machines are still in operation, according to Jamie Mohr, Bob’s romantic partner in the final years of his life. “He built all of the first Omega machines from the scrap,” she said. “And they were incredible! They looked like something from Fantastic Planet or something.”
After Margo became pregnant with Maryam, the couple left Canada, feeling the area was too rural to start a family. Back in Brattleboro, Bob devoted himself to Omega, working out of a backyard shed. The company earned its first million dollars by 1973, and years of success and innovation followed. Over the next five decades, Omega grew to employ hundreds of people in Brattleboro and emerged as one of the top companies in the field of photonics.
In 2020, Omega was acquired by Artemis Capital Partners, a Boston equity firm specializing in the tech industry — though Bob remained a stockholder.
By the time Bob relinquished control of the company that he’d quite literally built from junk, Omega had left its imprint on American industry and scientific endeavor. It had constructed a 12-wavelength monolithic filter in 1984 that was used to view Halley’s Comet. Two years later, Omega filters aided the Human Genome Project, an international scientific venture that mapped and sequenced human DNA. In 1990, the company was integral in repairing the Hubble Space Telescope’s wide-field planetary camera. Mars missions, endoscopy imagers, and scores of patents and inventions followed.
“Bob was a brilliant physicist,” said David McManus, whom Bob hired to work for him at Delta Vermont in 2008. “More than that, though, he was unconventional. He always wanted to be exploring new ways of doing things. You might not see Bob’s path at first, but you just had to follow it, because it was going somewhere amazing, usually.”
Larisa Volkavichyute, Bob’s daughter-in-law and also his property manager in recent years, had a unique perspective on his life philosophy.
“At some point, I realized that he truly viewed his entire world — business, emotions and connections — through the prism of physics,” she said. “He once said to me, ‘Physics is all there is.’”
He truly viewed his entire world — business, emotions and connections — through the prism of physics.
Larisa Volkavichyute
Bob didn’t do much of anything in a conventional way. When he saw that the old governor’s mansion on Western Avenue in Brattleboro was for sale in 1980, he bought it with buckets full of silver. He even paid Omega employees in silver, if they wanted, and advised his friends to use it instead of the U.S. dollar to protect against inflation.
“He always had a creative solution, no matter the problem,” Bob’s oldest son, Robin Johnson, recalled. “His house was full of tubes and pumps to self-water all of his houseplants. When we brought some people to his house after he died to look at the heating system, the techs had to go back and get their manager to figure it out, because they couldn’t figure out what he had built,” Robin continued. “He thrived on solving problems. He might even create a problem sometimes, just so he could solve it.”
Maryam remembers her father as a tough nut to crack, emotionally. “He was a very private man in a lot of ways, and he wasn’t good at emotional conversation,” she said. “He was good at talking about scientific, economic or environmental issues — he could go on and on about things he was passionate about. But if you asked him how he was feeling, he’d just say, ‘I’m fine.’”
In 1980, Bob and his second wife, Elaine, helped organize and establish the Neighborhood Schoolhouse, an independent elementary school on the former site of Mark Hopkins College in Brattleboro. Some of Bob’s children were students there, and Bob and Elaine “continued to support the school for many years” after their kids had moved on, school board president Norma Willingham said.
Bob and Elaine started a scholarship fund at the school in honor of their son, Dylan, who died in 1994, days before he would have finished sixth grade and just shy of his 13th birthday. The couple’s only child together had developed cardiomyopathy after an earlier illness. Bob and Elaine struggled with their grief, and it weighed on their relationship for years. They separated, then eventually divorced in 2018 but remained friends until Bob’s death.
Those closest to Bob say his son’s death changed him. “After Dylan died, Dad threw himself into his work, even more so than before,” Maryam said. “Part of that was certainly compensation for his grief, but a lot of it was this renewed desire to make things better. He really wanted to leave a mark on the world, and Brattleboro in particular, in my brother’s memory.”
Bob directed much of that energy into his hometown. He built Delta Vermont from the ground up. The campus was conceived as a unique planned community of efficient, affordable housing and commercial space, a place where scientific innovation and the comforts of rural living could exist side by side.
When Omega moved to the Delta campus in 2008, Bob turned over the Victorian church that had housed its offices since the ’80s to his son Robin. Over several years, Robin set about transforming it into the Stone Church, a state-of-the-art music venue that opened in 2016 and draws nationally touring acts.
Also in 2016, Bob bought another abandoned church in downtown Brattleboro, the former First Baptist Church on Main Street. In 2019, with Mohr as executive director, he launched Epsilon Spires there, a nonprofit arts and culture organization and performance venue.
Mohr, who later became romantically involved with Bob, first met him through another of his great passions: sheep.
About a year after Dylan’s death, Bob became obsessed with a rare breed of sheep called Scottish Soay. He purchased his own flock, which he often drove up to Nova Scotia, 14 hours each way, to graze. Mohr met Bob after answering his Craigslist ad seeking a shepherd.
“There just weren’t a lot of people like Bob,” Mohr said. “He was kind, generous and open-minded but also so driven. And I think in some strange way, he saw that in the sheep, too.”
Maryam also saw a connection between the flock and her father.
“When he got sick, he would get really emotional about how self-sufficient and kind to each other the sheep were,” she said. “It was an ideal he wanted humanity to achieve.”
Bob’s family is still deciding what to do with the sheep. Maryam found a business in Massachusetts that would employ them to graze solar fields. “That would so fit in with Dad’s main concerns for the sheep and the environment,” she said.
A true taciturn Yankee, Bob rarely spoke of his accomplishments. “Bob was so important to the local community,” said McManus, his employee from Delta Vermont. “But he wasn’t a person who flaunted that or was at fundraisers and parties. He wasn’t your typical ‘successful entrepreneur’ guy. He didn’t promote himself, but he attracted people to his vision.”
He also had little interest in leaving his lifelong home.
“I used to joke with him that he moved three times in his life, and they were all on the same road,” Robin said with a laugh.
Toward the end of Bob’s life, as he battled amyloidosis, a rare disease that affects the organs and tissues, he was confounded by the fact that there was no readily available solution for his condition. “He couldn’t understand why he just couldn’t be fixed,” Maryam said. “It almost confused him: He’d fixed so many things in his life; why couldn’t this be fixed?”
Still, Maryam said, Bob was full of gratitude in his final days.
“I kept telling him about the tremendous impact he had on our lives, our families’ lives and so many other people,” she recalled. “I don’t know if he truly saw that, but I’ll always keep the memory of him sitting in his chair, looking out at his land and telling me, ‘I’ve been really blessed to live in this place.’”
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘He Really Wanted to Leave a Mark on the World’ | Robert L. Johnson Jr., February 13, 1945-December 29, 2025”
This article appears in April 8 • 2026.
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