By: James Wilson, a retired Associated Press executive who in a 32-year career covered some of the nation's biggest stories, including the uprising at Wounded Knee, S.D., has died. He was 68.
Wilson's wife of 45 years, Ruth, said he died of cancer Sunday at their home in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb.
Wilson became Chicago bureau chief in 1985 and remained in that post until his retirement in 2000.
"Jim was a hard-driving newsman who not only had a wonderful AP career of his own but also trained another generation to follow him," said Tom Brettingen, the AP's senior vice president of Global Newspaper Markets.
Wilson joined the AP in 1967 in Bismarck, N.D. He was named news editor in Minneapolis in 1970.
He helped cover the flood in Rapid City, S.D., that killed 238 people in 1972 and the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., by members of the American Indian Movement in 1973.
Former Chicago Tribune managing editor F. Richard Ciccone, who worked with Wilson in the late 1960s and early 1970s, called him "a great newsman ... a very fierce competitor."
During the Wounded Knee occupation, Ciccone recalled, Wilson ignored an FBI blockade and sneaked into the village in the middle of the night to cover the story from inside.
When there was a question on the accuracy of the death count in the Rapid City flood, Ciccone said, "Wilson goes to the [temporary] morgue and he counts every single body bag and, as it turns out, the AP was right."
As news editor in Boston from 1974 to 1976, Wilson directed coverage of the conflict over desegregation of the city's public schools.
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