Colonel Tom Jones

January 13, 2024

As a child, Colonel Tom Jones was fascinated by the stories shared by his grandparents, Florence and Haskell Jones, both native Kentuckians and phenomenal storytellers. Their early lives were certainly not easy as they told the story of their childhood in Graves County, Kentucky, in the early 1900s. Both attended a one-room school, which his grandmother eventually taught. When his grandfather was 16, his father died—leaving him the head of a family of eight. With no other option, he had to find more suitable work, which began the stories of their migration northward from Kentucky to Akron, Ohio, in 1917. Upon arriving, his grandfather worked in the rubber industry and sent money home at a time when Akron was one of the fastest-growing towns in the country.

When the boom faded after World War I, his grandparents returned to Kentucky where, for two years, his grandfather worked as a motorman on the streetcar line in Paducah. Then, once the economy recovered, his grandparents returned to Akron, where his grandfather would eventually become the last marshal and first chief of police of Tallmadge, Ohio. In that capacity, he also organized the volunteer fire department, road crew, and Civil Defense during World War II. Following the war, he served multiple terms as a city councilman, helping the city transform itself during the postwar boom.

Aware of the Honorable Order of the Kentucky Colonels through his grandfather, Colonel Tom Jones nominated his grandfather by enclosing newspaper articles about his service and petitioned the Governor of Kentucky to commission him as a Kentucky Colonel. On December 11, 1980, Governor John Y. Brown commissioned Haskell Jones as a Kentucky Colonel.

As his grandparents were telling their stories, Colonel Jones recorded over 40 hours on cassette tapes, and he edited their stories as a family project during his time working as a writer in San Antonio, Texas. He self-published these stories as On a Burning Deck, An Oral History of the Great Migration, as one of the only sources of information from individuals who migrated north during this time. The book was picked up by Publisher Weekly and given a great review. Colonel Jones wrote several follow-up articles about his grandparents’ stories. He was awarded an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Ohio Local History Alliance and a Kentucky History Publication Award in 2018 for his work. In August of 2018, after the book was published, he received his own Kentucky Colonel Commission, which is now hanging in his home next to his grandfather’s certificate.

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