Apartment resident’s rock and roll collection lost

Bob Johnson might have been dead if he’d been napping Wednesday afternoon.

The resident of the Rosewood Club Apartments was watching TV in his third-story unit when he heard people outside yelling.

Then he heard a loud pop. And then he saw flames coming over his deck.

“I ran out the front door into smoke so thick I couldn’t see anything,” he said.

Johnson said he’s grateful he was awake so he had time to make it out alive.

“It happened too quick,” he said.

Aside from the TV remote he had in his hand and a small pink flip phone that was in his pocket, there are no personal possessions left in the burned-out skeleton of a building that was once his home.

Johnson is now staying with his brother, who lives in a nearby building in the complex.

He’s not concerned about replacing his clothes, but he’s mourning the loss of a collection of classic rock music and memorabilia that took him decades to build.

“I can’t replace anything in there,” he said.

The collection included cassette tapes and CDs of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, as well as T-shirts and other collectibles. Johnson had two guitars, electric and acoustic, and a Fender amplifier he used to play his own music.

“A lot of that stuff you just can’t find anyplace,” he said.

One of his favorite pieces was an old Hendrix shirt he bought in a smoke shop in Spokane in the early 1990s. It was brightly colored, psychedelic and had a huge print of Hendrix’s face, he said.

“It cost me like $25 at the time,” he said. It hung on the wall in his apartment.

The fire started in the unit below Johnson’s and spread quickly, growing to a blaze that killed both occupants of the downstairs apartment and seriously injured a firefighter who tried to save them.

Standing in front of the gutted building Thursday, Johnson said it’s the second time he’s had to leave an apartment after a fire. In 1999, he was living in the Fairmont Apartments next door to the vacant Mars Hotel and Casino at Sprague Avenue and Bernard Street.

An arsonist set fire to the casino early one July morning, causing a fire that jumped quickly to the apartment buildings and left 108 people homeless. Johnson was among them and had to rely on Red Cross help to get back on his feet. His apartment was badly damaged by smoke, but that time, many of his possessions survived, he said.

Now, he’s left with a Beatles shirt his brother gave him.

“That’s better than nothing,” he said.