To commemorate the event, an engraved aluminium plaque was presented to Willie by MDA president Glynn Kerr, at the Harley-Davidson engine assembly plant on Capitol Drive, Milwaukee on 21 October. Accepting the award, Willie wished to thank the numerous staff members from Harley-Davidson's design department, who also attended the presentation, for their support and contributions over the years.

An alumnus of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Willie G. worked initially with Ford's design studio in Detroit before joining Harley-Davidson in the early sixties. Arguably, his most significant design was the Superglide, one of the earliest attempts at a mass-produced custom machine, which, until that point, had seemed a contradiction in terms. By the late sixties, custom bikes already had a large following, especially in the US, and older Harleys were the most frequently used donor. Seeing this demand, Willie came up with the Superglide as a mild, factory-produced answer to the true, one-off custom machines. With it, he created the basis on which a large part of future Harley-Davidsons would be based, in addition to the archetypal street custom bike, as copied by manufacturers around the world to this day.