Photographer Robert “Bob” Magill died in 2005 after a long illness. While his name may not be instantly familiar to most racing enthusiasts today, Magill was both a gifted photographer and—well into his eighties—a walking archive of race results and rider details from a bygone era. He shot for motorcycle magazines and newspapers in the late 1940s and 1950s, recalling vivid moments from events that have long since faded from memory.

Magill covered races and events all over California in the late ’40s with a Kodak Medalist and other medium-format rigs. His work appeared widely in magazines and newspapers for about 15 years before he seemed to drop out of the racing scene in the ’60s, when he became closely involved in the Apollo space program through his long-time employer, Rockwell.

Like several other multi-talented figures from the motorcycle world, Magill was drawn into the early days of America’s aircraft and space programs. While he was renowned as a shooter, he was also an accomplished machinist, built houses, and served in a Coast Guard sea-and-air-rescue unit during WWII. The US space program thrived in the 1960s thanks to men like Bob Magill—people who could build anything, fix anything, and adapt to almost any challenge.

Just when you thought you’d grasped the scope of his life, Magill would surprise you. He might pull out a print from 1944 and casually say, “Did I ever tell you I knew Marilyn Monroe before she was famous?”—or something equally unexpected.

He retired from Rockwell in 1976 but would occasionally turn up at Del Mar or other races. His early photo archive was mined for projects like Steve Wright’s American Racer 1940–1980 and Motorbooks’ 1980s Triumph series, among others. In print, his credit often read simply: “Magill.”

Like many purists, Magill never accepted the industry-wide shift from medium-format cameras to 35mm without what he considered a proper assessment of quality. “I can’t understand why fellas use 35mm. The frame is so small, it’s like shooting through a microscope,” he’d muse.

Bob Magill was 87.