William Eben Johnston of Malibu, California, died in the early morning of September 21, 2021, a week short of the last day of his 89th revolution around the sun. He would have been happy to know that it was the night of the fullest full moon of the year, and a day before the Autumnal Equinox.
He is survived by his daughters Allyn Johnston and Sharon Johnston-Lee, his sons-in-law David Johnston and Mark Lee, his grandchildren Eamon Johnston and Lilly Lee, and his sister, Vivian Black. His wife of 52 years, Pamela Pearson Johnston, died on March 23, 2010.
Bill was born on September 28, 1932, in West Los Angeles. He graduated from University High School and UCLA, where he played basketball under coach John Wooden, was a member of Phi Delta Theta, and, in his senior year, was the Cadet Commandant of the Army ROTC. After graduation, he spent two years at Fort Benning in Georgia, where he completed the Basic Infantry Officer Course, qualified as a parachutist and jump master, was a weapons instructor in the Infantry School, and coached the Infantry Center basketball team.
He graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1960, and served as Deputy Attorney General, State of California, and Deputy City Attorney, City of Los Angeles, before entering private practice in 1963, retiring in 1992.
In 1988, he began what became a second career at Lannan Foundation, a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity. Among the writers whose work Bill especially championed in Lannan’s now 32-year-old Literary Awards Program are Barry Lopez, Richard Powers, Seamus Heaney, Peter Reading, Stephen Greenblatt, Pattiann Rogers, Bill McKibben, Carl Safina, Elizabeth Kolbert, W. S. Merwin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Luis Alberto Urrea, Peter Matthiessen, Mary Oliver, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
In 1994, Bill was instrumental in founding Lannan’s Indigenous Communities Program to support the urgent needs of rural Native American communities, funding projects that are consistent with traditional values in the areas of education, Native cultures, the revival and preservation of languages, legal rights, and environmental protection. With help provided by this program, Native people have acquired more than 7,000 acres of land for the preservation of traditional ceremonial grounds, as well as for cultural and ecological conservation projects, an accomplishment that was especially close to Bill’s heart.
He was a deep lover of the natural world, a keen birder, and a passionate admirer of the work of California poet Robinson Jeffers. This Jeffers poem in particular gave him solace throughout his life:
Vulture
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, "My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you."
But how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering
away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten
by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment;
What a life after death.
Bill’s family will always think of him when they see vultures—and condors!—soaring above the hillsides and precipices of the Big Sur Coast where he spent many of his happiest days.
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