Entering Local Politics
Wilson was elected mayor of the town of Vivian in 1966 and served until 1972, when he assumed the District 1 seat in the state legislature. When Wilson won the Democratic nomination for the seat, the Republican candidate, Bruce Lynn withdrew in favor of Wilson, with whom he had served on the North Caddo Parish Hospital Board. Lynn described Wilson as a "very successful" mayor and a popular Vivian grocer. He was also an avid golfer and was often seen on the links at the Monterey Country Club in Vivian. Wilson was succeeded as mayor by James Whitfield Williamson, a son of Earl Williamson, whom Wilson had followed in the position. Earl Williamson was also a veteran Caddo Parish Police Jury member. James Williamson, like Wilson, was affiliated with the Citizen's Bank board.
Wilson was considered a conservative reformer during his term in the legislature. He was one of the leading supporters of the right-to-work law that was adopted the year after he left the legislature. Wilson also worked to deregulate the milk industry. In 1975, Wilson, still a Democrat, ran for the state Senate but lost in the general election to Democratic incumbent and later Republican Donald Wayne "Don" Williamson, also of Vivian, another son of Earl Williamson and a brother of James Williamson. Don Williamson defeated Wilson in part by reminding voters that Wilson had a high rate of absenteeism while in the state House. "He did not vote for you. Why should you vote for him," proclaimed the Williamson advertisements. Bruce Lynn by a narrow margin won Wilson's House seat in the 1975 general election.
Read more about this topic: Jimmy Wilson
Famous quotes containing the words entering, local and/or politics:
“At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)