James Wilson; Former Governor’s Father

James Boone Wilson, an advertising executive who shaped and influenced his second son, Pete--who served as mayor of San Diego, U.S. Senator and governor of California--has died at the age of 97.

Wilson, a lifelong Midwesterner who spent some of his retirement years in Florida, died Wednesday of kidney failure at a retirement center in Montgomery, Ohio. He had lost his vision because of macular degeneration.

It was James Wilson who sent young Peter, or “Percy,” as he called him, to the best private schools, saw that he dressed impeccably with never a hair out of place, encouraged him to go to Yale, discouraged him from making a career of the Marine Corps, and forbade him to drop out of the law school (UC’s Boalt Hall) he had suggested. Even though the future governor and presidential hopeful failed the California bar exam three times, his father insisted he try a fourth, and successful, time.

“He did have a couple of fits of lost confidence, and it made him wonder if he was not cut out to practice law,” the elder Wilson told the Sacramento Bee in 1995 when his son was running for president. “I said, ‘By all means, go ahead and practice the profession you were educated to do.’ ”

The former governor never regretted his father’s advice, he said in a statement announcing the death: “I learned far more of real importance and value at my father’s dinner table than at Yale or law school. Both by precept and more importantly by example, he taught my brother and me that we were blessed to be born Americans, that we were obliged to give something back to our community, our state and our country--and to leave them better than we found them.”

The well-spoken young James Wilson sold college jewelry on the road and worked his way through the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He began his career as a reporter, then switched to the business side of Scripps-Howard newspapers in Chicago and Philadelphia.

James Wilson joined the D’Arcy Advertising Agency at its St. Louis headquarters in 1940 and during World War II had McDonnell Aircraft Corp. as a client, personally suggesting the names for its carrier-based fighter planes Phantom, Voodoo and Banshee. He also handled Midwestern campaigns to recruit servicemen and raise funds for war bonds and the Red Cross.

His other advertising clients included Coca-Cola, St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch and, after he agreed to open a D’Arcy office in Chicago and run it, Standard Oil of Indiana (later Amoco and now BP Amoco). For the oil company, he devised the American Freeway Patrol, to offer stranded motorists free gas or towing.

Politically conservative, as he groomed his son to be, Wilson created campaign advertising for Ohio’s Republican U.S. Sen. Robert Taft.

During his retirement years in Delray Beach, Fla., James Wilson served a term as city councilman and was president of the Chamber of Commerce and head of Community Chest, the area’s largest charity.

Once widowed and once divorced, he is survived by his third wife, the former Reba Morton Burns; two sons, James Jr. and Pete, and one grandson.

Services will be scheduled next week in Delray Beach, Fla. The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to the John and Theiline McCone Macular Disease Research Fund of the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, 100 Stein Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90024-7000.