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More biography
editThe current (11/16/2023) article seems to rely heavily on a CBR obituary written in 2005. Here are a number of facts and sources that can be incorporated.
Bill Yoshida did not start on Archie comics, although he spent most of his career there and almost all of his credited work is through Archie. In the Creepy Fan Club page in issue 15 of Creepy in 1967, printed as page 268 of "Creepy Volume Three", the editor wrote "The penciled pages are given to Ben Oda for lettering. Lately we have also been using up and coming young letterer Bill Yoshida to help lighten Ben's burgeoning burden." Oda was the letterer for all of the stories in Creepy from its debut, and clearly was paying his friend Bill to help him on the side. These issues are not credited in the Grand Comics Database because it isn't clear exactly which stories he worked on.
Nick Cuputo's article Ditko and Wood showcases two pages lettered by Bill Yoshida from Charlton comics title Jungle Jim in 1969. The Grand Comics Database also includes work for Tower's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Woods' Witzend anthology.
Although the Grand Comics Database includes many Archie stories potentially written by Bill Yoshida going back to 1958, I'm not sure what that is based on. Searching the database for only textually credited work, the oldest is for a trio of stories that appeared in Archie number 176: A Pair of Aces, One Good Turn!, and I Spy. That issue had a cover date of September 1967, on sale July 11, 1967. That would make sense as a follow-on to his work on Creepy. Creepy 15, where he was described as a "up and coming young letterer" at age 46, had an on sale date of March 16, 1967 according to GCD. It's easy to imagine Yoshida being introduced by Ben Oda to his publisher friends along with samples of his Creepy work, and his jokester personality hitting it off with Archie's staff.
Todd Klein's article about Ben Oda includes a brief bio of Bill Yoshida. It includes a 1965 start date for work on Archie, but with such a brief bio I would treat it as an "about" statement.
Klein pins Yoshida's birthplace as Brawley, California. That matches his records in Ancestry (WW2 draft card, birth registry). Brawley is the center of Imperial County, east of San Diego. He was born on December 2, 1921.
By 1940, Bill Yoshida's family was in Los Angeles (census). His father Ben was a gardener, matching the profession Bill listed on his draft card. His mother Chiyo had no profession listed but presumably helped Ben. Bill worked as a salesman for a "retail fruit & vegetable" store. His older brother Frank worked doing delivery for a florist. They lived at 519 N Virgil Ave, just east of Hollywood, alongside almost entirely Japanese American families. Looking at the current map of LA, it shows nearby neighborhoods of Koreatown, Little Bangladesh, and Historic Filipinotown.
Bill Yoshida was sent to the Manzanar prison camp during World War Two. He was indexed as "Saburo Sonny Yoshida" in the "Final Accountability Rosters" in 1945. The index incorrectly lists his date of birth as December 2, 1920. He left Manzanar on April 17, 1944 for Chicago, and his wife Lillian joined him with their son Daniel 3 months later. Daniel was born at Manzanar. Another child, daughter Emily, was born soon after Lillian arrived in Chicago. Another son, Don Yoshida, posted briefly about his father on July 21, 2017 on Instagram, calling him "Bill (Sonny) Yoshida".