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 Mary Jones ’39 has a mission --- or two. |
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by Bridget Meeds ’91
She’s busy writing an article for her local paper. Town officials are trying to change a law to allow trucks on the tiny country road through Odessa, and she’s against it. "Why would they do that?" I ask. "One word," she says, looking conspiratorial: "Wal-Mart." The Big Box is threatening to come to her neck of the woods, and Jones is mad as heck. Her current activism is nothing new. Instead, it’s the continuation of a very unusual life, which has taken her to bomb-scarred Hiroshima in the 1950s, into Newark’s race riots of the 1960s, and back home again. "Talk about an adventuresome person!" says her niece Deborah Jones, an artist who lectures at Ithaca College. "My aunt has done some very untraditional things. She’s been a role model for me." Mary Jones was born in the very house in which she still lives. She graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in physical education. One of her fond memories of her time at the school is of watching rehearsals of the drama department’s production of The Student Prince when she should have been studying. She also recalls sliding down Buffalo Street on icy days, hand in hand with her girlfriends. After college she took a job teaching physical education in Williamsport, New York, and settled in for what she thought would be her whole life. But then everything changed. "What happened," she says, "was the atomic bomb. I was in that kitchen, over there, ironing some clothes. And I heard the news on the radio. I knew within 15 minutes after it happened that I was going to do something different with my life." Jones immediately applied to work as a missionary for the Methodist Church and trained for a year. A long international shipping strike complicated her travel, but as soon as it ended she boarded a freighter bound for Hiroshima. Her job was to teach English to girls. "People’s lives were pretty bad at that point," she remembers. "Everybody was cold. The girls had chilblains. The school was a temporary building, just unpainted boards. Thank God for soybeans! Miso kept me healthy." Later she built and ran a social center for the Buraku people, an outcast group. She spent 10 years altogether in Japan. She is still in touch with many of the people she met there. "They’re just as much my people as Debbie," she says. When Jones returned to the States in 1959, she earned a master’s degree in religious education from the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She then took a position as a guidance counselor at the Newark City Hospital School of Nursing, helping female African American students find jobs. It wasn’t an easy time, with a great deal of civil rights unrest and even fires and riots in Newark, where she lived. But she felt she was doing important work and loved it. When Jones retired in 1980, she returned home to Odessa. Some people might have slowed down at that point, but she founded Our Mother’s Garden Club to beautify public parks and roadsides in Odessa and in 1992 began the Schuyler Interfaith Peace Group. It’s made up of people from churches all over the county who work together on peace and social justice issues. The group’s latest project involves "peace quilts" with panels from around the world. And somehow Jones finds time to maintain her mother’s extensive gardens and visit with her sisters. Two years ago Jones re turned to Japan on her own. This time her motivation was researching her autobiography. "The trick," she confides, "is finding the time to write it. There’s still so much to do!" And with that, she gets back to fighting Wal-Mart. Photo by George Sapio |
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A. Ozolins, Ithaca College Office of Publications, 27. Nov. 2001
Mary
Jones ’39 is on deadline. When I arrive at her white clapboard house with
green shutters in rural Odessa, a half hour outside Ithaca, she hustles
me inside. The tiny octogenarian is wearing a brightly colored cotton
blouse and a large pendant that reads, "War is not good for children
and other living beings."