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Subject: [CASANFRA] JIC Bio of F. S. Wilson
Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 23:57:35 EDT

JOURNALISM IN CALIFORNIA

BY JOHN P. YOUNG

Pacific Coast and Exposition Biographies

CHRONICLE PUBLISHING COMPANY
San Francisco, California
1915

Page 227

Great Men and Great Men's Achievements
Form the Background for
California's Progress
Page 336

Fred S. Wilson


THE rule that the man who knows the most about his own business, and has the
best chance of success in plying it, is he who has learned it from the very
bottom up-this rule holds good today just as much as it ever did. And it must
continue to apply so long as our present-day economical system lasts.
Fred S. Wilson, vice-president of the Thermoid Rubber Company,
manufacturers of Nassau Tires, turned naturally to the rubber business when it came time
for him to begin casting about for a means of self-support. He was born May 5,
1877, in Trenton, New Jersey, son of Richard P. Wilson and Catherine (Jones)
Wilson. Trenton is a manufacturing center for rubber and pottery, and it
follows that the younger generation takes to one or the other of these two
industries.
Sixty years or more ago Joseph 0. Stokes, superintendent of the New Jersey
Steel & Iron Company at Trenton, gave a job to Richard P. Wilson, then
fourteen years old. Ten years or so later, when Wilson started out for himself in the
coal and lumber business, he took in with him Stokes' eldest son, W. J. B.
Stokes, then aged 17. Subsequently W. J. B. Stokes became president of the Home
Rubber Company, among others, and when Fred S. Wilson was sixteen years old,
he left the public schools to accept a position tendered him by Stokes, his
father's old-time business partner. This has kept the names of Stokes and Wilson
linked together for more than half a century.
Mr. Wilson went into the rubber business through the factory door. He was
put to work at the bench, as an apprentice in the manufacture of bicycle tires.
Here he labored three years, when, having made good, he was sent to New York
as city salesman for the
Thermoid Rubber Company, also a Stokes concerns. And it is with the Thermoid
Company that he has remained.
Three more years, spent as city salesman, and Mr. Wilson was given a
territory in the Eastern States. He traveled over this and other territories, with
consistent success, for about five years.
By his knowledge of the business and his ability as a salesman he made
him-self valuable and the result was that he was recalled to the main offices at
Trenton and made sales manager, later being given the added work of advertising
manager.
In 1907, fourteen years after he took his place at the apprentice's bench,
Mr. Wilson became a director in the Thermoid Rubber Company and was chosen
its vice-president, a position he retains to this day. The concern is a close
corporation, consisting only of Joseph Oliver Stokes, as president; Fred S.
Wilson, as vice-president; W. J. B. Stokes, treasurer; and Robert J. Stokes, son
of W. J. B., secretary and factory manager.
Mr. Wilson went to Chicago in 1911 to open up a factory branch. This once
under way, the Thermoid Company began considering the advisability of locating
another branch on the Pacific Coast. In this connection it was taken into
consideration that the opening of the Panama Canal would make California and New
Jersey next-door neighbors, and that a vessel loaded with goods within a
quarter of a mile of the Thermoid factory at Trenton, could be unloaded at the very
doors of the concern's Pacific Coast warehouse. It was decided that one member
of the company should be sent here, to take up his residence on this coast
and become a part of it. And in 1913 Mr. Wilson, chosen for the place by his
associates, came to San Francisco.
The Thermoid Rubber Company, whose local branch office is in the Monadnock
building, is known throughout the world for its Thermoid Brake Lining and
Nassau Tires. The Nassau owes part of its fame to the fact that it is the tire
used by nearly all automobile racers of the day. The Peugeot Car, in which Dario
Resta won both the Grand Prix and Vanderbilt Cup races at the Panama-Pacific
Exposition, was equipped for both races with the same set of Nassaus. And the
tires would last through another race easily.
The business of the Thermoid Company has been built up on the strength of
honest goods, honest treatment and honest advertising. It believes that a
"white lie" is no whiter when mixed with printer's ink. And as proof of the wisdom
of this policy, its factory has for more than four years been running 23
hours a day.

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