By Jerry L Wilson – Guest Author for the Hillsboro Herald-
As an owner of this bank, each citizen would receive an annual report and, of course, a dividend check. Your joint-stock share today of America, Inc. is worth around $500,000. It’s your inheritance from 250 years of capital building by our forefathers. Talk about being born with a silver spoon in our mouth! A 5% dividend to each U.S. citizen would be $25,000/yr. For those who fear this would be unworkable, one should realize that economics is a pseudoscience based on medieval notions; it is in no way useful to a modern economy, an economy where the most important workers in society, mothers, aren’t paid one dime for their labor.
Editors Note: I have known Jerry Wilson since the 1980s, mostly vicariously, throwing in the occasional beer at Helvetia Tavern or sighting overhead as he whizzed his whirlybird chopper about the countryside. I also knew him as the marketing genius who hired my HilHi Classmate, Scott Madsen, to represent his innovative home exercise machine and help launch his family’s local empire made off selling metal and sophisticated rubber bands. The company was known as Soloflex, an international sensation and a big Hillsboro Employer for many years.
Wilson was there for me when former LEGENDARY Hillsboro Mayor Gordon Faber came to me as a fledging community leader and asked me to stop the Women’s Prison that was quietly being planned for the edge of North Hillsboro. It was real. It was happening fast. And no one was doing anything. I cobbled together a rag-tag crew of business leaders, and Wilson was the main supporter. We stopped it. A few years before that, he had tolerated me as a Portland State Business student finishing my degrees and allowed me to write my graduate paper on Soloflex and its inefficiencies and opportunities. Right. Like I could tell Jerry anything about business. But he was cordial, inspiring, and forthcoming. The genius of the man shone through the noisy factory, smoke, my youthful hubris, and deadlines.
Some may remember Jerry and his wife Marilyn putting a royal treasure trove towards shutting down Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Columbia County. This facility had the potential, in a 3-second flash, to vaporize Portland/Vancouver. They put up Millions, did the work, and they shut it. Few people now remember that or would say so much as thank-you because they forget about it- but they did it.
Or maybe you remember Marilyn’s passion play and eatery. Does the Sweet Oregon Grill on the edge of Helvetia ring a bell? There was abundant great food and music at the site of Lary Babcock’s old hamburger joint. No? How about the massive Soloflex Campus on NE 53rd and Elam Young Parkway, which they sold most of to the City of Hillsboro – the same beautiful land that the City of Hillsboro has now built the Hidden Creek Community Center, 53rd Avenue Park, and the new Nueva Esperanza apartments on. Make the connection? Jerry also had a fun run for Governor of Oregon- read up here.
And last but not least, and maybe most of all, is Jerry’s relationship with Cannabis. Oh, that stinky weed that has been a medicinal joy for millennia of people. That vilified and nasty, vile plant that the Wilsons spent another fortune trying to legalize in 1986. They were unsuccessful but acted the part of a harbinger of things to come- a thing that now chips in around $200 Million in tax revenues for the people of Oregon. That plant has been a huge part of Jerry’s most unusual and interesting life.
Many of you have had interactions with this man who can be described, in my opinion, as cool chaos in a bottle—and I can’t smoke weed. I suggest you read his book if you have never heard of Jerry Wilson. Either way, neither he nor I care. But enjoy the ride because this old sage will be a featured author here at the Hillsboro Herald for as long as he wants. He is living in old town Hillsboro these days after many years in the desert. Now in his 80s, he has returned to us, and we are so lucky to have him.
“Marilyn, where’s Jerry?”
“He’s flying a charter. Why?”
“I don’t think so. I just saw him on Walter Cronkite evening
news. He’s been arrested for flying in the largest load of pot
in history.”
“Oh my!”
By the time Marilyn’s mom called her with the “news” I was
already in solitary confinement, in Ardmore, Oklahoma with a
$500,000 bail set. Next to my cell I could hear a Negro fellow
in obvious agony. “Oh God, Oh God it hurts.” All night long
he moaned and groaned. No sleep that night. Well, what was
left of the night. I was locked up at 3 am after what had been
three long days of work with little sleep; flying from the
Arizona boneyard through Florida to the Guajira Desert Colombia, loading the plane, taking some pics, chatting with the Indians, then back to Ardmore hidden by my lead plane’s
transponder and on to the four waiting U-Haul trucks. That’s a
lot of flying in a slow airplane with no autopilot. I should have
gone right to sleep but that screaming guy next to me just
wouldn’t let it happen.
I was arrested by Oklahoma State Trooper Roy Rogers on Gene
Autry Road. I’d grown up watching the good guys on TV always
win so felt a bit out of place. The cops said I had 17,000 lbs.
of primo Colombian marijuana on the DC-4. Funny, when I
weighed it during loading it weighed 21,000 lbs.From the book- A Soloflex Story- by Jerry Wilson
Get the Book Here if you like – https://www.amazon.com/Soloflex-Story-American-Parable/dp/1439232008
Worked for the Wilson’s for many years. Best employer I ever had. Smart. Dedicated. Sharing.