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High Times' Ganja Chef Dead At 56
'Chef Ra' Died At Home In His Sleep At Age 56
12.29.06|associated press

Since the late 1980s, marijuana-culture magazine High Times has published a column telling readers how to make dishes like Great Ganja Pumpkin Pie Potatoes and Vegetable Harvest Medley with Ganja Sauce.

The column ended this week when its author, James Wilson Jr. of Urbana -- known to readers as "Chef Ra" -- died in his sleep at home at age 56. He died early Tuesday, possibly of a heart attack, friends said.

Wilson was well-known in Champaign and Urbana as the longtime host of the radio show, "Roots, Rock, Reggae," on WEFT-FM in Champaign. He drove a cab for a living, and was a regular at bars and parties in the area.

Wilson was born in 1950 in Charleston, W. Va., where his father, James C. Wilson Sr., was a coach and faculty member at West Virginia State University, his sister, Karen Wilson, said. The family moved to Urbana in the 1960s when Wilson Sr. started working on his Ph.D at the University of Illinois.

At Urbana High School, Wilson excelled in football, basketball and track, and was elected senior class president and homecoming king, family and friends said.

"He was like a super jock that was headed toward a big scholarship," said lifelong friend and Urbana native Steve Hager, the editor of High Times. "What happened is he got politically active with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; he got politicized."

He also took to the counterculture of the 1960s as if he'd been born to it, Hager said. After hearing Jamaican music for the first time while at Woodstock, Wilson went to Jamaica and became a Rastafarian, Hager said.

"The essential Ra, he was much bigger than the pot," said Robert Henderson, who grew up with Wilson in Urbana and now lives in Venice, Calif. "He was a man of the people."

Wilson began writing his High Times column, "Chef Ra's Psychedelic Kitchen," in 1988 at Hager's invitation.

The food was Southern at heart, Hager said, and good enough to lead to talk of a restaurant. But that never happened.

"He could make plans and stuff, but really he wasn't gonna go out and do that kind of thing, chase money that hard," Hager said. "He'd rather go fishing."

That was the brother Karen Wilson knew. Jimmy, as she called him, was somehow smaller than the larger-than-life ganja gourmet.

"When he came home to his family, he was not that person," said Karen Wilson, an attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C. "He was much quieter. It was almost as if he expended his energy outward."

But outside Champaign and Urbana, he was Chef Ra, she said.

On vacation last summer on Martha's Vineyard, Karen Wilson was talking to some friends of her son. The conversation turned to fishing and food, and she mentioned that her brother was big on both. After a little more discussion, it dawned on them who he was.

"They both said, 'Oh my god, you're Chef Ra's sister,"' Wilson said, laughing.

A memorial for Wilson is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at Wesley United Methodist Church in Urbana.