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FOXBORO - It's understandable if, upon driving past Gillette Stadium and Patriot Place and marveling at what has become of the site in their lifetimes, Patriots' fans under the age of 30 forget that anyone other than Robert Kraft ever owned the team.

It's understandable, yet unfortunate.

James Busch Orthwein may not have been the most obscure of the five men who can claim majority ownership of the Patriots' franchise at one time or another during its 49 seasons of existence. That distinction goes to Robert Marr, the construction magnate who was one of original owner Billy Sullivan's investors, and briefly took command during a power struggle in 1974 before Sullivan could purchase all of the team's outstanding stock.

But it was a checkered past of threadbare and incompetent ownership that made Orthwein's brief, "caretaker" stewardship of the team stand out for its integrity and foresight.

Orthwein died Friday at his St. Louis-area home after a long bout with cancer. He was 84. Heir to the Anheuser-Busch fortune, Orthwein didn't really need the aggravation of being the owner of the New England Patriots of the early 1990s. He had made his bones as an advertising executive, building a small St. Louis firm into a major player on the international

stage, and spent much of his personal time in quasi-retirement as a painter and an outdoorsman, an avid angler who had fished off the coast of Bimini with Ernest Hemingway.

He was 68, and active in the efforts of a St. Louis group that was trying to attract an NFL expansion franchise to replace the departed Cardinals, when the league came to his doorstep looking for someone to keep its Boston-area franchise from folding.

Victor Kiam - the former salesman who had bought Remington Products Inc. because, as he exclaimed in his commercials for the razors, "I loved it so much, I bought the company!" - had bought the Patriots from the Sullivans and their partners in 1988, then ran the debt- and scandal-ridden franchise into the ground and was looking to sell to the highest bidder, just as he was being forced to do with Remington.

But with an iron-clad lease for the Patriots to play in Foxboro Stadium through 2002, out-of-town bidders were balking at the added expense it would have taken to free the Patriots from the lease. Fearing that Kiam might disband the team - a circumstance that was unthinkable with the NFL otherwise experiencing its greatest period of prosperity - Orthwein's St. Louis group was tabbed to purchase and operate the New England franchise until such time that either a local ownership group could be found, or circumstances dictated the move of the franchise elsewhere.

From the beginning, Orthwein faced media criticism in Boston. Lacking the charisma and bombast of Boston-based public figures, the soft-spoken Missourian was characterized by columnists as a doddering, grandfatherly carpetbagger. But those characterizations failed to take into account Orthwein's demonstrated skills in marketing and promotion that would prove vital to his behind-the-scenes efforts to pull the Patriots out of their financial morass.

As stated by prominent St. Louis attorney Walter Metcalfe in the obituary for Orthwein that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Jim was a private man who thrived as a fisherman, outdoorsman and painter. Yet he understood business and he had an enormous talent to see what was important and then connect his product, be it candy or cola or beer or the then-broken and ridiculed Patriot franchise, to the public."

Orthwein claimed publicly from his first day as team owner that his intention was to stabilize the franchise, rebuild it and revitalize it, to spur public action toward the construction of a new stadium to increase the team's financial viability, and then to sell the Patriots to local owners committed to picking up where he left off.

One of his first acts proved to be the most important toward bringing respectability back to the Patriots.

When he hired Bill Parcells as the head coach, and gave him near-dictatorial authority to revamp the front-office organization of the team, Orthwein proved to everyone that he was serious about changing the ways that had turned the Patriots into the league's laughingstock within less than five years from their appearance in Super Bowl XX. Orthwein also used his skills in marketing and advertising to change the presentation of the Patriots and make them more appealing to the Boston-area business community, bringing in additional revenue through commercial partnerships.

Orthwein then threw his support behind efforts to develop a stadium-convention center complex (nicknamed the "Megaplex") near the pre-Big Dig Southeast Expressway - although he clearly underestimated the stubbornness of the Boston political structure, and its distrust of outsiders.

Still, when Parcells made quarterback Drew Bledsoe the first draft selection in the NFL in 1993, and the team ripped off four straight wins to end that season, it appeared that Orthwein was making good on his promises to rebuild the Patriots rather than preparing them to move elsewhere.

But circumstances elsewhere had already started a countdown clock that would dictate the fate of the Patriots.

St. Louis city officials had committed to the construction of a new domed stadium in an effort to win one of the two expansion franchises the NFL was going to add for the 1995 season. It was presumed at the time that Orthwein's stewardship of the Patriots would buy St. Louis brownie points in the effort to replace the Cardinals, who had moved to Phoenix in 1988.

But by November 1993, the league had chosen Charlotte and Jacksonville as its expansion cities - leaving St. Louis holding an ace in the hole in the form of the Patriots. To sell the team to St. Louis-based investors led by Stanley Kroenke, Orthwein needed only to be able to break the lease that was held by Kraft, who, along with partner Stephen Karp, had purchased the stadium from the Sullivan family for $25 million in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in 1988.

Kroenke reportedly offered Kraft (who had bought out Karp's interest in the stadium) $102 million for the lease, only to be rejected. As a result, Orthwein established a deadline and said that if local ownership did not step up by the end of 1993, he'd have no choice but to sell the team to the best offer - and presumably, that offer would come from St. Louis.

Weeks of negotiations caused the deadline to be extended well into the new year. But on Jan. 21, 1994, Orthwein and Kraft sat together before the media at a Boston hotel to announce that they had agreed upon the details of the sale.

Kraft, owner of a multi-million-dollar international paper-products firm, reportedly paid $168 million for the franchise and assumed other debts in what was hailed as the most expensive purchase of an NFL franchise to that time. Sixteen years later, the Patriots franchise, Gillette Stadium and the Patriot Place commercial development is reportedly worth in excess of $1.2 billion.

In his remarks to the media during the sale-announcement press conference, Orthwein expressed satisfaction and pride in having lived up to what he said he was going to do when he purchased the Patriots.

"I'm personally very proud of what we have accomplished in the 19 months that I've owned the franchise," he said. "The franchise that I'm passing on is not the one that I purchased. When I bought the team, there was more focus on what was occurring off the field than what was occurring on the field. The Patriots were viewed with disdain, both around the league and in the community. The franchise was viewed as a loser, and that was not acceptable to me in fact, losing has never been acceptable to me. And as soon as we could, we formulated a plan to change all of that.

"I've tried my best to awaken the community to understand the value of an NFL franchise to them," he continued. "Having lost our team in St. Louis, I have first-hand knowledge of that, which I tried to import to the political and business leaders. I haven't seen a report card from (former Boston Herald reporter) Kevin Mannix, but I think we accomplished quite a bit."

Orthwein lauded the fans of New England, who flooded the ticket office with purchase orders on the day Parcells was hired in 1993.

"As much as I wanted a team for St. Louis, this community has shown how much it wanted to keep the Patriots here," he said. "I leave the Patriots with my head held high. I accomplished what I set out to do I want to tell everyone that from the day I bought the team, I tried to do the right thing. I told everyone on our staff to be guided by that single principle."

He feared he would be vilified in his native St. Louis for not bringing home an NFL team, but that would be mitigated a year later when Los Angeles Rams' owner Georgia Frontiere teamed with Kroenke (with Orthwein's backing and support) to bring that franchise to the Gateway City.

As for the Patriots, Orthwein said he left them in position to enjoy a bright future, but that someone else would have to make the commitment to lead them there. Five Super Bowls and three championships later, Kraft has clearly accomplished that mission.

But if it hadn't been for the quiet marketing genius and avid sportsman who became the right man at the right time for the Patriots franchise, it may not have come to pass.

MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com. Read Farinella's blog, "Blogging Fearlessly," at thesunchronicle.com/farinella.