Bill Johnson

Photo courtesy Marianne Johnson

Cover artist William Gray “Bill” Johnson was born in 1931 in Texas. His mother Retha was a remarkable woman who in 1929, at the age of 23, was the first woman pilot in the state of Texas, passing the exam after less than nine hours of instruction and the only person in her class to achieve a perfect score. She was working as a fourth-grade teacher at the time. She married Bill’s father, William Gray Johnson Sr., a year later; he was an aviation instructor, and it’s likely that they met when she was learning to fly. Tragically, however, he drowned shortly after their first anniversary, five months before Bill was born. 

Bill attended Texas Christian University but left before graduating to serve in the air Force during the Korean War, where he played tenor sax in the Air Force Band at Clark Base in the Philippines. After the war he enrolled at the Academy of Advertising Art in San Francisco. There he met his future wife, Nancy, and the pair were married in the city’s famous Grace Church in 1955, and their first child was born there. The couple moved to New York, where Bill worked as an illustrator for paperback novels; his wife was frequently his model. 

After their second child was born, they relocated back to San Francisco and then finally in about 1965 to the Seattle area, where they remained. At that point, Bill was working primarily as a television art director for advertising agencies like McCann Erickson and Ayer Baker. Nancy was a painter and became a teacher at the New School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. Though he was never a pilot himself, he was a plane spotter as a child during World War II, and an aviation photographer and later was described as “a sax-playing-designer-illustrator-aviation photographer … a Texas boy always ready to tell it like it was.” He died July 7, 2009, at age 77; his obituary called him “a legend in the fields of illustration and advertising art direction, and it will be a time well in the future that his achievements are ever equaled.”

Courtesy Marianne Johnson