If Jim White Jr. understood anything, he understood fire — how it behaved, breathed and spread. White, who founded a fire-testing lab in Kelso, investigated house fires, hotel blazes, the crash of a Florida commercial jet. And more often than not, he could retrace with precision the blaze’s path.

White, of Kelso, died Nov. 18 of complications from diabetes. He was 67.

He was born to James A. White Sr. and Lottie Faye (McDonald) White in Scott, Ark. on March 19, 1942, and spent his youth on his father’s cotton and soybean farm.

White met his future wife, Bettye Belle White, at a Timex watch factory in Arkansas in 1966. She worked on the production line and he was her supervisor.

“He kept coming down and flirting with me and asking me out,” Bettye said. “I fell in love with him at first sight. … He was so gentle and always just asking me how I’m doing.”

The couple were married later that year.

White earned a physics degree from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and went to work for Weyerhaeuser Co. in Arkansas. In the mid-1970s, the company transferred him to its Longview fire lab. There, he set the company’s building materials alight to ensure they would meet building codes.

When Weyerhaeuser shut down the facility nearly two decades later, White bought some of the equipment, moved it to Kelso and set up his own lab.

He founded the Western Fire Center in 1994. Manufacturers from all over the country still send samples of drywall, siding, windows, doors and other materials so the company can light them on fire and record how they burn, said White’s son, Mike White, 34, who is now the company’s owner and president.

But White’s true passion was investigating the cause of fires, his son said. White was part of a team that investigated the 1996 crash of ValueJet Flight 592, which killed all 110 people aboard, Mike White said. White visited the crash site in the Florida Everglades. In Kelso, he burned pieces of aircraft similar to the ValueJet plane to determine how a fire started in the cargo hold and melted the aircraft’s controls. The conclusion of White and his team: improperly packaged oxygen containers, his son said.

He also investigated a fatal hotel fire in Puerto Rico and a fatal house fire in Alabama. He set up a replicas of portions of the buildings in his lab, lit them and recorded how the fires spread.

Before conducting these tests, Mike said, his father would take bets from his staff on how the fire was expected to progress: Five bucks says it blows out the living room within two minutes.

“And I’ll be danged if he wasn’t right most of the time,” Mike said. “He wasn’t arrogant in any way — he was the most humble man you can meet — but he was really confident in his science and he was so, so good at it.”

In all, Mike estimated, he testified as an expert witness in roughly 40 trials.

White is survived by his wife; two daughters, Tammy Lin Mansure and Kimberly Kaye White-Bodine; a son, James Michael “Mike” White; 10 grandchildren; and a great-grandson.