SEATTLE — Steve Johnston, Everett native and longtime Seattle Times reporter and columnist, has died.
For years, Johnston wrote a Sunday humor column for the newspaper that occasionally touched on his experience with multiple sclerosis.
The Times reports the 63-year-old Johnston died Thursday of throat cancer. The MS had weakened him over the years and led him to decline treatment for the cancer diagnosed late last year.
“I always say that MS won’t kill me,” Mr. Johnston wrote in 1990, eight years after he was diagnosed. “It will just bore me to death.”
It was a grim but typical comment from a man for whom boredom, not illness, was the worst possible fate. The article won a first-place award from the National MS Society.
Although he was a skilled breaking-news reporter, Johnston may have been best known for daring to call his wife “The Truly Unpleasant Mrs. Johnston” in print nearly every week — after she forbade him from using his initial title for her, “Saint Nancy.”
After taking early retirement from The Times in 2001, he continued to write “Sunday Punch” columns for the newspaper’s Pacific Northwest magazine.
Over the years, those columns took readers inside the Johnston household, exploring struggles over the TV remote, paying bills and raising children.
Dozens of the columns, collected by Johnston’s daughter, Molly, were recently reprinted as a book, “Tales of the Truly Unpleasant.” In a foreword in the book, Molly Johnston said growing up, she would often hear compliments from her teachers about her dad’s columns. “I’d obviously try to utilize them to my benefit, and increase whatever grade I was already receiving in class,” she wrote.
Bill Ristow, a former Seattle Times editor who helped edit the book, had been Johnston’s supervisor in the newspaper’s Eastside bureau “as much as anyone could pretend to be in charge of such a notoriously free agent,” Ristow said. “He was so much fun to work with, with his irreverent, sarcastic humor and his penchant for creating bizarre, pointed nicknames for everyone.”
Born Oct. 9, 1946, Johnston grew up in Everett, in a large family that remains close. While he was still in high school, he and two friends ran a coffee shop called “Three Thieves.” When his draft notice arrived in 1965, he enlisted in the Navy.
After leaving the service, Johnston took journalism classes at Everett Community College. His first composition was a humorous look at a classmate’s hopes of becoming a radio DJ. He transferred to Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and became editor of the campus newspaper, The Western Front.
While still in college, he worked as a reporter for The Bellingham Herald, and later edited the weekly Molalla (Ore.) Pioneer before moving to Seattle, working for several years as a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before being hired by The Seattle Times in 1978.
Johnston once explained his interest in journalism by saying, “I get to ask nosy questions, see interesting things and write about them.”
Early in his career, we wrote about a high-profile 1979 racketeering case that sent a former Pierce County sheriff to jail. While covering that trial in federal court in San Francisco, he met Nancy Barrett, and the two were married the following year.
When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, The Seattle Times put virtually its entire staff on the story, but Johnston was the only reporter named in a front-page byline the next morning. The page carried an overall story about the volcano, bearing the credit “Times staff,” alongside an additional story Johnston wrote about a Kelso man who’d barely made it out alive after the eruption killed two of his friends.
Besides his wife and daughter, of Bellevue, survivors include sons Eric of Shoreline, Tim of Seattle and Barrett of Seattle; brothers Bill of Tacoma, Chuck of Everett and Scott of Everett; a sister, Jayne McDonald of Everett; and three grandchildren.
A private memorial is planned.
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