community bonfire. It became an annual post-holiday tradition in Cleveland, and in time he required kids to be at his house by 8 A.M. sharp if they wanted to participate. He was goal oriented even then, eager to beat his number from the previous year. “I’d get furious at a kid if he didn’t show up,” he said. He admits to harboring a visceral dislike all these years later for a kid whose mother wouldn’t let him start collecting trees until 10 A.M.
“Looking back, there were a lot of firsts in my life,” Jones said. “I was the first person to collect all the Christmas trees. I was the first person to buy a fax machine in Cleveland. I was the first to have a cell phone. I was the first in Cleveland to have a Segway.”
Jones was never much of a student. He always remembered being kept back in sixth grade but after his mother died he found paperwork reminding him that he had been held back a second time. In high school, his accounting teacher told him he would fail her class if he didn’t buckle down. “It doesn’t matter,” he remembers telling her. “What you can’t do yourself, you can hire to get done.” He described his family as “regular middle class” but also mentioned a housekeeper who refused to enter his room because of the snakes and other small animals he kept there. By his account, he was a boy’s boy, into sports and outdoorsy things. His teacher would describe a fungus or a species of plant—and the next day he would show up with a sample.
“I always wanted to be a biological teacher—or a wrestling coach,” Jones said.
Wrestling was his life in high school except during football season. To a certain extent wrestling is still his life. “I was a great high school wrestler,” he boasted, second in the state in his weight class by his senior year. He had been a pretty good football player as well, he told me, starting fullback, but then the school was integrated and after that he did nothing but block for a much speedier tailback who was black. He wasn’t resentful, Jones said—but he was also sure to mention that his former teammate is on skid row. In high school, he and his girlfriend were named “best-looking couple” but he was disappointed. “I wanted ‘most likely to succeed,’” he said.
Jones spent a year at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro before dropping out to work at his father’s credit agency. By then, his father, increasingly incapacitated by emphysema, was only able to work a few hours each day, and a rival credit agency had recently opened in town. “Come home and save the business,” his mother asked him, “so we can afford to send your two sisters to college.” Jones didn’t need much convincing. He had married his high school sweetheart, who was pregnant with their first child. They were living in a trailer near school. Even before his mother’s call, he had taken a summer job with a nearby collection agency. That firm had five offices, compared to his father’s one—and Jones was already looking ahead to the possibility of going into the family business. “I copied every form,” he said. “I got copies of their collection letters. I studied how they hired their lawyers. I studied how they did everything.” He was eager to prove to people back home, he said, that he was more than just a star wrestler.
In Cleveland, people know Jones’s name if for no other reason than that they see it everywhere. The local high school is home to a million-dollar Jones Wrestling Center and there’s an Allan Jones Intercollegiate Aquatic Center on the campus of the University of Tennessee. He seems to own half of downtown, and when one is driving the main highway that cuts through town, it’s hard to miss the giant, department-store- sized lettering spelling out JONES MANAGEMENT on the side of his headquarters. Then there are all the smaller reminders, such as the granite marker that stands prominently in the plaza in the center of Cleveland with an inscription: “These Courthouse Trees Are Planted in Memory of W. A. ‘Bill’ Jones By His Son W. A. ‘Allan’ Jones, Jr., and Dedicated to All Citizens of Bradley County.” The joke in Cleveland is that W. Allan Jones, Jr., has never planted so much as a tree in town without simultaneously issuing a press release and striking a bronze commemorative.
Jones doesn’t seem very well liked in his hometown, at least if the sampling of people I met with is any indication. In recent years, Jones has donated property to the city for the expansion of the local public library and he built an attractive white bandstand on the town square to replace the old one. But the city councilman I spoke with didn’t seem to care for Jones, nor did the retired publisher with whom I met while in town. Even Jones’s generosity served as a target of their derision. Sure, he rebuilt the old bandstand but then he seems to have spent nearly as much money throwing a big party in his honor, flying in Tony Dow, Ken Osmond, and Jerry Mathers (Wally, Eddie Haskell, and the Beav) for the occasion. A woman who has known Jones since grade school brought up that same party when describing Jones as a man “who lives totally and completely in the past.”
My companions for lunch my first day in town included a teacher, a local businessman, and a corporate attorney. All of them had been raised in the area and all seemed to share a distaste for Jones. For the teacher it was the secondhand stories she’s heard about what it’s like to work with Jones and the strings he’s attached to the money he’s given to the schools. “He’s not one to just make a donation,” she said. “He puts on all these restrictions.” Most of the money has gone to the school’s wrestling program. The lawyer was from a moneyed background and seemed to look down on Jones as a man who did not know how to handle his wealth.
The businessman offered perhaps the most interesting perspective. Early in our meal he took a call on his cell phone that he took care of in a rapid, mumbly code like a bookie or a stock trader. After a couple more of these staccato conversations he explained that while he owns a legitimate business, he earns extra money providing cash advances to those who don’t have the checking account or regular paycheck a person needs to take out a payday loan from a firm like Jones’s. For years he’s been watching Jones. He was impressed by what he’s accomplished, he said, but not the way he’s handled success. It offends him that Jones is “not a man capable of doing anything quietly.”
When I told my luncheon companions that I was scheduled to have dinner that night at the home of a local attorney named Jimmy Logan, it provoked laughter. Allan Jones might want to be known around town for his philanthropy and his business accomplishments but he seems most famous for an incident that occurred shortly after he dropped out of college and moved home to Cleveland. Separated from his wife and suspecting she was unfaithful, he spliced into the phone line of his old home to record her conversations. That’s how he found out she was carrying on with Logan. Unhappy that Jones was playing tapes of his pillow talk around town, Logan used his influence to get Jones convicted of federal wiretapping charges. Eventually Jones would be exonerated by an appeals court in Cincinnati that ruled that since Jones paid the bill, he could not be guilty of recording a conversation on his own telephone. But that was only the start of the feuding between Jones and Logan that entertained the community for years. From the perspective of my lunch friends, I was stepping into a favorite story line from a popular old soap opera.
“He’s a sleaze,” Jones would say of Logan the next day. “He’s a scumdog.” Logan, however, proved more magnanimous, at least in front of an out-of-town journalist sitting in his study with a tape recorder. His left eye squinted, he curled his lip, he leaned in close as if he were about to impart some great considered wisdom, and said, “Allan Jones has done many fine, fine things for this town.”
Logan might not have offered much in the way of insight into Jones but over dinner that night he helped to explain why payday lending had taken hold in the soil of Cleveland. This corner of the world has long been the kind of place that gives a man the elbow room and the ethical leeway to make a living any way he sees fit. Grundy County, to the west, had long been known throughout the region as the car-stripping capital of the South, and there was a time when Cleveland was renowned throughout the United States for a related business. Locally they tended to call them “shade-tree mechanics,” men who made their money rolling back odometers for unscrupulous auto dealers looking to jack up the prices of used cars. Dating back to the 1950s and through most of the 1980s, Logan said, you’d see cars up on lifts in front yards and backyards all over town, their wheels spinning backward for hours at a time so that tens of thousands of miles would disappear from the odometer. But don’t sell these hardworking souls short, Logan counseled. You’d see them working at 5 A.M. and they’d still be at it until midnight. They would bang out dents and install new upholstery—whatever it took to make a car with 90,000 miles on it plausibly look like one with 40,000 by the time an out-of-town dealer came to pick it up. The dealers got their money’s worth, Logan seemed to be saying, but the U.S. Department of Justice didn’t see it that way, nor did the state officials who finally beefed up the odometer tampering laws and Tennessee’s auto fraud division starting in 1986.
On his first day on the job Jones thought his father might have lost his mind. He had recently hired a new manager but he let him go and announced to Jones, then nineteen years old, “You’re in charge, son.” But the son gamely settled in and began to crack the whip like an old pro. He figured out the average collection agent made twenty-five calls a day, but by his reckoning a person should reasonably make a new phone call every five minutes. So he imposed a quota of at least one hundred calls per day per person.
“After that the company really took off,” Jones grinned.
His father had been a glad-handing, good-time Charlie who had served as the president of both the Kiwanis and the local Chamber of Commerce. It was important to the senior Jones to be well liked. His son, by contrast,
