Kelly Johnson Article

“Air and Space ” magazine has done a nice, lengthy article/bio on Kelly Johnson, the designer of the P-38, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The article is very in depth, and goes all the way back to his early days growing up in an extremely poor family in Michigan.  Here’s a brief excerpt.

Clarence Leonard Johnson was born in 1910, the seventh of nine children, in Ishpeming, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His family, Swedish immigrants, was poor; their lives were only a step or two above those of frontiersmen. His mother took in laundry and the young Clarence sometimes delivered the wash on his wagon or sled. Ashamed of his family’s poverty, he kept to the back alleys on days when the streets were crowded. “I vowed that one day I’d return to Ishpeming not on the back streets but the best streets,” he wrote in his 1985 autobiography, Kelly: More Than My Share of It All.

The article is well worth the read, and our thanks to Keith B. Rosenberg for giving us the heads up on this.

You can read the entire article here.