Lora Johnson has passed away
My friend Lora Johnson passed away this past week at the age of 64. I’ve known Lora for 25 years or more. She was a wonderful model builder and contributed to this website and wrote a chapter on the Icarus in my book, CultTVman’s Guide to Classic Science Fiction Models. She was author of Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise, Worlds of the Federation, and the Star Wars Technical Manual, as well as a series of critically acclaimed Christian oriented science fiction novels. More recently she was a contributor to the Roddenberry Archive, contributing to the visualization of the Starship Enterprise.
Lora was an amazingly talented graphic artist and model builder. She was a perfectionist, and nitpicker, translating the spacecraft we knew from movies and television into realistic, practical vehicles. She was opinionated and passionate about all she believed in. Oh, we could butt heads. We were both opinionated, but we respected each other enough to not let our differences of opinion get in the way of our friendship. We became friends online through our mutual love of the hobby. As so often happens, I get to know the person behind the “celebrity.” I was a Trek fan, and Lora was a respected, established Trek author. But the bottom line is that she was just a person that loved Star Trek, the technology aspects, and the model hobby. Just like all of us.
Lora was a regular part of our weekend chats, back in the day. She shared insights into Trek models and ships. Star Wars and more. She saw things no one else did.
A few years ago, Lora was facing some serious health issues. I reached out to the hobby community on her behalf, and many of you contributed and helped her through that difficult time. I am grateful to all of you for your support for my friend.
She went through some major life changes and reached out to me and included me as she went through that. That was a very difficult, challenging time, but I am grateful to have been supporting and that she valued our friendship to reach out to me.
I talked to Lora’s son today and shared with him how much people appreciated her contributions to the hobby, Star Trek, and fandom. Please keep Lora and her family in your thoughts at this time.
At this time, I don’t have further information about what happened, but Lora had a history of challenging heath issues.
Michael Okuda posted a very nice post about her on Facebook
I will update this with further info when I have it.
