Wilbur Levin, who died last Tuesday at his Manhattan home, was the Kings County clerk and a Brooklyn eminence. He was 84.

Sporting a bow tie and an immaculate suit, Levin cut an august yet sprightly figure as he informed freshly impaneled juries of their grave responsibilities. He was also responsible for swearing in new citizens and on occasion performed marriages, provided the participants made a special promise never to divorce.

The Kings County clerk – technically the county clerk and clerk of the Supreme Court and commissioner of jurors – is appointed for life. In 1989, after suggesting that the current clerk retire following the disclosure of various improprieties, the state Supreme Court presiding justice, Milton Mollen, set out to find someone of unimpeachable integrity. He settled on his frequent tennis opponent, Levin, who also happened to be a Republican – not necessarily a disadvantage under the circumstances. “He was a person of total integrity, with great managerial skills,” Judge Mollen said.

In addition to sitting on the boards of half a dozen civic institutions, including the Brooklyn Law School and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Levin had led both a department store, Martin’s, and a bank, Independence Savings. He was also known for leading various civic organizations, including Click, the original committee charged with finding a productive use for the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the 1960s.

Raised in Brookline, Mass., Levin was a longtime resident of Manhattan but seemed to regard Brooklyn as his home, perhaps because of family ties. After graduating from Yale and serving in the Army during World War II, Levin joined the family business, Martin’s department store, located in what is now Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall. Martin worked in most departments at the store before becoming president in 1967.

Martin’s closed in the early 1970s, and Levin became CEO of the South Brooklyn Savings Bank, later renamed Independence.

Levin headed the finance committee at Brooklyn Law School for more than 30 years and also had lengthy tenures on the boards of the Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Hospital Center, the Prospect Park Alliance, and the Helen Keller Services for the Blind.

Levin doted on his accomplished family – his wife, Phyllis Lee Levin, is author of “Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House” (2001), and his daughter Kate is cultural affairs commissioner. To cultivate close relations with and among his seven grandchildren, each summer Levin invited them for several weeks to his country home in Pawling, N.Y., where he operated “Camp Wilbur,” from which their parents were excluded.

Known to all as Bill, Levin was nevertheless proud of his unusual name and had a long-standing offer to associates, offering a scholarship to any child named for him. Recently, one took him up on it, but for a daughter, blessed with the unusual name Wilburna.

An old-school liberal Republican, Levin was known for cultivating friendships with people of widely divergent ideologies, from black nationalists to neoconservative newspaper publishers.

“He operated via lunch,” Levin’s son Peter said. “He would probe and find out how people came to their views.”

In recent years, as the party moved toward more conservative social stances, Levin had come to feel distanced from the Republican party and considered himself a “RINO – Republican in Name Only,” his son said.

Levin played tennis weekly at the Heights Casino, where his game “was marked more by canny tactics and anticipation than strict athletic prowess,” according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He played the game until December, when the pain related to the cancer that would kill him forced him to stop.

Wilbur Arthur Levin

Born October 21, 1920, in Brooklyn; died April 12 of intestinal cancer at his home in Manhattan; survived by his wife, Phyllis, his children, Kate, Emme, John, and Peter, a sister, Jeanne Brenner, and seven grandchildren.