LAKE COUNTY — Walter Wilcox, a longtime Lake County supervisor, died Tuesday evening at the age of 83.
Kim Crow, Wilcox”s daughter, said he came down with pneumonia about a week ago and was not able to recover. He died at around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Meadowood Nursing Center in Clearlake, where he had been a resident for two years, Crow said.
Wilcox served as District 3 supervisor for 16 years, from 1979 to 1995, one of the longest-running tenures for a Lake County supervisor.
“He was a really great guy,” said Karan Mackey, former supervisor for District 4 who also served for 16 years from 1984 to 2000. “He was very determined to make sure things got done. I thought he was an excellent supervisor with an excellent sense of humor. (His sense of humor) disarmed people to get them to work with him more readily.”
Wilcox was honored for all his years of dedicated service to the county with a proclamation from the Board of Supervisors (BOS) when he retired in January 1995.
In his time with the BOS, Wilcox served on numerous organizational committees, including the California State Association of Counties, the Eel-Russian River Commission, the North Coast Emergency Medical Services Joint Powers Authority, the Area Planning Commission and many others. The proclamation also states that Wilcox was affectionately referred to as the county”s “elder statesman.”
Wilcox was born on July 18, 1928 in Flint, Mich. After a childhood with a struggling-alcoholic father who had difficulty keeping a job, causing the family to move around a lot, his father sobered up and eventually moved the family to Woodland Hills in Southern California in 1945. Wilcox had quit school in the 11th grade to begin working and found a job with his father mixing mortar for masons in the San Fernando Valley.
He returned to Michigan for a year and worked in factories and hospitals before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1948 as a flight engineer. During his time with the Air Force, he was stationed overseas in Guam, Saipan and Iwo Jima, as well as bases in Texas and Michigan.
He married June Poye in September 1951. They had met a few years before in Detroit. Crow said they had gone on a double date with other people and discovered they liked each other instead. They wrote each other during his Air Force deployments and he would visit her often.
They had three children: Kim, born in 1954, is the oldest and only daughter who resides in Yuba City near her mother; Michael, born in 1956, who resides in Portland; and Todd, born in 1961, who died in 2000 after contracting HIV and AIDS many years before, Crow said.
The family moved to Southern California in the mid-1950s before settling in Thousand Oaks in 1961. Crow said it was during their time there that Wilcox found community service. Wilcox was appointed to the Thousand Oaks Planning Commission and Master Plan committee. He served on one of the first Air Quality Control boards in the area. He ran for city council in the early 1970s and lost by only a few votes, Crow said.
In 1976, the family vacationed on Clear Lake at the Tiki-Tiki Campground. It was enough to convince Wilcox to move to Lake County. Crow said they bought the Redbud Motel and eventually settled into a home in Lakeport, where they lived for 35 years.
Wilcox used his political experience to run for county supervisor in 1978 and won. Crow said his election victory was a “shock” to the family because he was an outsider. She said he loved his time with the BOS and “would still be there today if his body and mind were still there.”
“He left an incredible legacy, both for the community and the family,” Crow said.
Wilcox is survived by his wife, June, his two children, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Kevin N. Hume can be reached at kevin.n.hume@gmail.com or call directly 263-5636 ext. 14.
