Bye Buddy
He always played On the Road Again. This one's for him.
Bye Buddy
My colleague and friend, Molly Cogan, wrote a tribute yesterday about our beloved friend who passed away on Monday.
I want to add to it.
Molly and I met on the road. That’s how a lot of us found each other. Thrown together by campaigns, policy tours, events that required everything you had and then a little more. Johnny Williams was the constant in a lot of those miles. The person who showed up, handled it, and made the impossible feel manageable.
For those who didn’t have the privilege — Johnny owned and operated a bus transport company. What started as a single leap of faith in the 80s grew into a full fleet operation. He saw something the industry hadn’t caught up to yet: that campaigns and major tours needed the ability to move fluidly from community to community, and a bus was the most powerful way to do it.
He built the model. Then he kept building.
At the prime of some of those campaigns and tours, we could effectively hit eight to twelve cities in a single day. I think our record was 15. Those are 15 full events with sound, staging, lighting, dignitaries, movements, local city involvement, and a full program all wrapped up with a press avail. Multiple buses running simultaneously around the country. Multiple teams. A tour director. Dignitaries moving by plane, train, and automobile between stops.
And before any of it could happen, advance teams had driven every route by hand. We are talking hotel computers to print maps. Driving every turn, every underpass, every airport approach ourselves to confirm the bus could get through. No GPS. No apps. A Blackberry if you were lucky, and we were thrilled the day they introduced a color screen. You knew that route because you had physically been on it. There was no other way.
We needed a full 13’6” of clearance. Anything at or less would not get us through. I see you, Norfolk Airport.
The buses weren’t just transportation. They were wrapped full coverage, the campaign messaging built right into the visual. Every stop, every roadside press avail, every pop-up moment was backed by a backdrop that worked and was multifunctional. What looked to the outside world like people just riding a bus was actually a micro-managed, minute-by-minute operation that accounted for every possible detail and then some.
And as the operation evolved, Johnny evolved with it. Faster than most. When the press vans that followed us needed to file stories on deadline, Johnny figured out how to get WiFi on the bus so they could tap in and transmit from the road. Nobody asked him to solve that problem. He just saw the need and built the solution. That was always Johnny. Watching what the people around him required and finding a way to deliver it before they knew to ask.
The glue holding all of it together was Johnny Williams.
Here’s what most people never see about operations at that level. I was on one movement that was very high profile. The images from the event were to be used for additional materials.
FLOTUS was en route. Less than thirty minutes out. The bus had already been cleared by Secret Service, wrapped, positioned, locked in as the visual backdrop for the press avail. A bomb-sniffing dog came through doing a final sweep.
The dog signaled. On the bus.
Everyone froze. Because when a dog signals a possible threat, there is no explanation that satisfies. It did not matter that a volunteer from the church where the city event was being held had innocently grabbed a bottle of 409 and wiped down the steps trying to be helpful. It did not matter that 409 is a known trigger for bomb-sniffing dogs. The protocol does not negotiate.
The bus had to move. Which meant tearing down an entire side of staging with less than thirty minutes on the clock.
Johnny didn’t panic. We all handled it together.
That’s what trust looks like in a high-stakes environment. Not a policy or a process. A person you know, without question, has your back. And knows you have his.
Not every story from the road is that heavy. Some of them are just ridiculous.
We were running lean on a campaign stop at one of the oldest ice cream shops in the Midwest. Rolling fields, small town, the kind of place that’s been there longer than anyone can remember. The plan was to leapfrog ahead of the motorcade by about ten to fifteen minutes, get everything set, and be ready when the bus arrived.
I was flying down country roads when I zoomed past a red Chevy Blazer. Unmarked. Small town police officer.
He pulled me over.
So there I am, talking into my radio to my colleague on the bus to ask Johnny to slow down without making it obvious to anyone in order to buy me time, while simultaneously telling the officer to please just write the ticket. Quickly. Because I have a motorcade a few minutes behind me and I need to be at the next stop before they arrive.
The look on his face.
I made it. Just barely. But that’s the road. You solve the problem in front of you and you keep moving. Every single time.
There was another moment I’ve never forgotten. We were on the road, and things were not going well. The kind of not-well that makes everyone tense and short and looking for somewhere to put it.
Brenda, Johnny’s wife, who traveled with him at various intervals, didn’t get frustrated. She gathered us. Johnny, Brenda, a small handful of us, standing in a circle, holding hands, praying over the events and everyone involved.
I think about that moment a lot. The chaos outside. The stillness inside that circle on the bus.
That is the Williams family.
Johnny had a huge heart. He worked hard for candidates and causes he believed in, across decades of this country’s history. He loved Brenda and his kids and grandkids fiercely, and he would tell you so.
He built something real. He saw a gap before anyone else did, took the leap, and then spent decades refining the operation as the world changed around him. He didn’t wait for the industry to catch up. He stayed ahead of it.
That’s the thing about people who build from nothing. They don’t stop at the idea. They stay in the execution, all the way through, for as long as it takes.
Every time we wrapped an event and said our goodbyes, he had one line.
Bye Buddy.
So that’s what I’ll say.
Bye for now, Johnny. Thanks Buddy.
If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, and resilience — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.
Prefer to read in the app without the inbox noise? You can switch to app-only notifications in your Substack account settings under Notifications. I want this to work for you however works best.