Franklin McMahon may be one of the country’s top artist/reporters, but he always tries to keep things in perspective.

Like when he got the letter notifying him of his June 25 induction (along with birdman John James Audubon) into the New York-based Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

“Not bad for a working stiff from the West Side,’’ said the 78-year-old onetime Fenwick High School newspaper cartoonist whose award-winning works have appeared everywhere from Look magazine and PBS-TV documentaries to ceramic tile Stations of the Cross in the McMahons’ parish church, St. Patrick in Lake Forest.

McMahon’s first job as an illustrator for Colliers (“That used to be a big magazine in those days’’) abruptly ended when World War II beckoned, with McMahon ending up in a German POW camp in early 1945 when the B-17 bomber he was navigating went down over Europe.

After V-E Day three months later, McMahon returned home to study at the Art Institute and later the Institute of Design, then did freelance work for several magazines including Look, mostly covering high-profile trials in courtrooms where cameras weren’t allowed.

“After being literally shot down on your last real job, you think seriously about whether you should ever be working for someone else,’’ he quipped.

And besides, “With Jackson Pollock painting abstracts on one hand and mainstream magazines like Life using only photos, there seemed to be a big space in between,’’ McMahon said.

He was right. Within a few years, McMahon was covering national stories like the 1955 murder of Emmett Till (a Chicago teenager lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Sumner, Miss.); Martin Luther King’s open housing marches here, as well as the Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial.

He also made three trips to Vatican Council II, and produced at least 2,000 drawings covering every presidential campaign since 1960 (once even riding with Richard Nixon on Air Force One).

And he was there with his charcoal pencils during Pope John Paul II’s Chicago visit and covered the 1993 Parliament of World Religions here (with text by the Dalai Lama himself.)

One of McMahon’s books, “This Church, These Times,’’ features 105 of his paintings and drawings from Vatican II through the 1999 papal visit to St. Louis, Mo.

Over the years, McMahon has been honored by the Holy See and received three Emmys and a Peabody Award, been a guest lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution, and received honorary degrees from Lake Forest College and Chicago’s Loyola University.

He may also be one of the few artists around with his own family art museum—the North Shore’s Gallery McMahon, run by son Mark, which features the works of several of the clan for whom art has become the family business.

Mark himself has done paintings for NASA and murals at O’Hare Airport; daughter Margot is a sculptor who did the six-foot hands that are part of the tabernacle design at St. Patrick’s in Lake Forest; William Franklin is an award-winning photographer and Web-site designer; and Debbie is a weaver who also works in tile.

Hugh, on the other hand, used to paint, but now sculpts caricatures out of pumpkins and watermelons that have appeared everywhere from “Saturday Night Live’’ and “Martha Stewart’s Living” to People magazine.

Other McMahon offspring, while not visual artists as such, have their own brand of creativity, said the senior McMahon, noting how son Michael played a Cardassian on the “Star Trek’’ TV series for six seasons while Patrick does health care PR in New York.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s nature or nurture, said McMahon, whose late wife Irene, a travel writer, also collaborated with McMahon on at least one of his illustrated books.

“Personally, I think a lot of it had to do with the kids seeing their father and mother working at home much of the time,’’ McMahon laughed, recalling how one of the boys almost took a different route.

“When he was about eight or 10 years old, someone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said ‘a commuter’ because that’s what he’d seen other men on the block doing every morning, taking the train to go downtown,’’ McMahon said.

“He eventually outgrew that idea.’’