Greenville – James Wiley Price Sr., 81, of Greenville, N.C. died Sept. 2, 2024.

A memorial service will be held on a future date.

Wiley grew up in Raleigh, and was the son of Marion Woodrow Price — a former managing editor of the News & Observer and member of the N.C. Wildlife Commission — and Mary Dudley Price, a former journalist with the Raleigh Times.

Wiley was a graduate of the N.C. State University School of Design. While there, he and a partner won a national award for creating devices to help people with developmental disabilities learn to walk. After college, he became a product designer for Cox Trailers of Grifton, then ran Fleet Cap’N Trailers of New Bern. Later he started his own steel fabrication company, Price Designs. It made production-line equipment for boatbuilders and steel cradles for large yachts, including boats used in the America’s Cup. This sounds perhaps grander than it was. There was much hard work and not much profit. He also was an initial partner with his younger son, Wiley Jr., in developing Catechna Village, a mobile home park outside Grifton.

Wiley was married a number of times, and also had a number of girlfriends over the years. Many were much younger than him, and every last one was way too tolerant. Finally, there was a part of Wiley’s character so defining that it must be mentioned:

He was a juvenile delinquent for approximately 73 of his 81 years. Wiley’s disdain for all authority frequently found its targets among officers of the law. In one signature teenage escapade, a Raleigh policeman simply trying to do his job received a fresh coat of paint. The artist did not escape the consequences that time, but he often did. Eventually his admiration for the outlaw life led him and his business partner, Tom Sugg, to dress as cowboys and occasionally start shooting at each other (with homemade blanks) in the midst of the startled patrons of their notorious Grifton bar, the Redneck Saloon. The saloon featured bands that played both kinds of music: Country AND Western. These included well-known acts such as David Allan Coe and Super Grit Cowboy Band. It was, fittingly, the time out Outlaw Country. The saloon years were perhaps the apogee of Wiley’s carousing. He often managed to avoid arrest but eventually he was jailed for being disrespectful to a judge over a traffic ticket that he did, of course, deserve. The resulting fine and community service did little to reform him, or change the way he drove the car involved, a bright yellow 1968 Corvette convertible with a NASCAR big block race motor built by Junior Johnson.

He and Mr. Sugg were a charismatic pair, and attracted a dedicated party of favorites who made the saloon their clubhouse and were up for just about anything the two concocted. One such concoction was The Plungers, a military-style marching unit that made its first appearance as an unauthorized entrant to the Shad Festival parade. In purple long johns, galoshes, pink construction helmets and carrying toilet plungers rather than rifles. Their various marching songs about town leaders and such were energetically and uniformly libelous. They were named Best Marching Unit, because apparently the judges could not understand the lyrics.

During college, Wiley worked for Benson Aircraft, a company near Raleigh-Durham International airport that unusual and harrowing flying machines called gyrocopters. The one hanging in the Smithsonian museum has his initials stamped on its frame. Wiley loved flying and it was perhaps his greatest passion. But it did not always love him back. He once left an airplane upside down in the sand at the end of the Ocracoke airstrip and made a hasty getaway by ferry before the authorities could question him on his motives for landing downwind. He also was a competitive sailor, and occasionally managed to steer in the right direction. Mainly it was about gathering yet another crew, though. The names of most of his boats and descriptions of the huge custom artwork on his spinnakers should, in this genteel day and age, be left to the imagination. But one sail bore the image of a belligerent, anatomically-correct 20-foot-tall canine and a fire hydrant that, given its fate, could only have been meant to represent authority.

Wiley loved cars and was choosy about vehicles, like the Corvette, or the racing motorcycle converted for street use. The same model Evel Knievel jumped over buses with. And the lime green Lotus V-8 with the license tag “Sneak” he drove to local car shows, but declined to properly register.  In his later years, Wiley enjoyed spending time on his quiet farm with his beloved dogs and an uncountable number of feral cats. And that is where he died. Peacefully, to the great surprise of everyone who knew him well. But make no mistake, right to the end he did it his way.

Survivors include son James Roland Price and his partner, Alexis Anne Moore, of Chapel Hill; son James Wiley Price Jr., and his partner, Gloria Solorzano, of Grifton; a granddaughter, Lillian Laura Price of Philadelphia, Pa.; a brother, Marion Dudley Price of Raleigh; a sister, Mary Josephine Price of Raleigh; and nieces Marion Price of Raleigh and Louise Price of San Francisco, California.

A sister, Catherine Anne Price, preceded him in death.

Memorial donations may be made to Covenant House, which helps troubled youth and those in crisis at www.convenanthouse.org.

https://www.smithfcs.com/obituaries/James-Wiley-Price?obId=32990316