Gerald Dean Wilson

Gerald Dean (Jerry) Wilson of Lewiston, WA 74 died Wednesday, May 31, 2000 at Deaconess Medical Center in Spokane.

Wilson was a lifelong pilot from the age of 14 at the Caldwell, Idaho, Airport who went on to own a major aeronautical firm with contracts throughout the world, and at age 39 started a Clarkston bank and became its major stockholder and chairman.

He was born June 18, 1925, in Atlanta, Kansas the son of Harry Sherman and Eva Smith Wilson. The family left Kansas, victims of drought and financially hard times, and settled in the small town of Houston, a Quaker community near Greenleaf in southwestern Idaho.

His love of flying resulted in taking his Greenleaf Academy tuition money and buying flying time, which resulted in his mother getting phone calls that school tuition hadn't been paid. He graduated from Greenleaf Academy in a class of 13 at the age of 17. That was after having enlisted in the U.S. Navy and attending Texas A&M Prep School.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army following graduation and was discharged in 1946 with a journeyman's electrical license.

In 1959 they moved to Lewiston, WA with their two children, and Wilson became a full-time flier, mostly backcountry and timber spraying in the Northwest and Midwest.

Wilson and Ivan Gustin purchased Hillcrest Aircraft in 1959. He continued to be president of Hillcrest, operated the past few years by his son, Gale, a licensed flier since the age of 16, two years earlier than his father. In addition to contract flying, Wilson purchased surplus engines and parts and re-sold them throughout the U.S.

Hillcrest also had flying contracts throughout the U.S., ranging from Hollywood movie productions to Western states wildfires to tussock moth spraying in Maine. The firm also specializes in helicopter and fixed-wing repair and service and is located at the Lewiston-Nez Perce County Airport.

Wilson received a number of flying awards, including Idaho Pilots Association awards for more than 2 million miles of no accidents or violations over nearly four decades. In 1971 he received the national Robert E. Trimble memorial award for distinguished mountain flying for his helicopter rescue of an injured smokejumper in a remote forest area in northern Washington.