Sniffles and the Bookworm in 1940
“It’s simple,” my father had quoted. “The truth is tart, the false is sweet.” Well, maybe, I thought, then what about candy? It took struggle, but I began to realize the difference between something sticky and sweet on your tongue and something sweet and sticky on your brain. Ergo (I had just discovered the word), I could enjoy something sweet on my taste buds without thinking much about it, but it was entirely impossible for me to read a book without thinking, and reading The Bobbsey Twins, for instance, made me think of throwing up.
Our wild-eyed brooding place: 115 Wadsworth Avenue, 1919–23
Mother not only loved books, she truly loved children and she loved bearing children. The term “natural childbirth” would have had little meaning; to her, there was no other kind. What bleating lambs are to Bengal tigers, Old Grand-Dad to many old granddads, the opposite sex to a fortunate few, having babies was to Mother. As I remember it, there was always the ebb and flow of countless children milling around our houses, wearing each other’s stockings, pants, and prejudices. I was seldom privy to which of these moppets were siblings and which were infant Mahomets who had gravitated quite naturally to the soft mountain of love that was Mother. But out of this teeming infantile anthill, at least four of us grew up to be graphic artists of one kind or another:
The charming hostel in CLAWS FOR ALARM (1954)
Charles Adams Jones, exhibiting a sense of false security and ease in Spokane, Washington, before the birth of his first son
Mabel McQuiddy Martin Jones, in a moment of uncertainty about the validity of motherhood
Margaret Barbara Jones, master weaver and designer, teacher and fabric designer; Dorothy Jane Jones, sculptor, writer, and illustrator; Richard Kent Jones, painter, photographer, teacher, and printmaker; and Charles Martin Jones, animator and animated-cartoon director. Why? Why us? Observation sadly compels us to realize that love alone is not enough—would that it were. No, there is always some oddity in the infant environment of the artist, some peculiarity unique to that environment.
Youngest child ever to be run out of Spokane, Washington, on a rail
In our case it was Father.
Father loved his children but hated having a family. He became belatedly aware one dismal rain-struck morning of the painful reality of his fatherhood: that he was up to his hips in children, and unless he wanted to blame those selfsame hips which were, after all, responsible, he must do something to rectify matters. In short, get out.
Now, all that remained for him was the technicality of how to do so. We were far from a wealthy family. Indeed, a history of Father’s fiscal meanderings would make a valuable contribution to the “What to Avoid” chapter of any “How to Succeed” textbook. In short, he didn’t have enough bread to supply bread for his family for the next twelve to fifteen years, much less provide all the gear, from garter belts to saddle shoes, necessary to see the self-respecting child through high school and, perhaps, college.
Portrait of the cartoonist as a fake baby, 1913
Mabel M. Jones and Charles M. Jones, 1913
Dorothy Jane Jones: in the history of man, the only older sister to be genuinely fond of a younger brother, Ocean Park, 1920
Ocean Park, 1920 Margaret Barbara Jones Dorothy Jane Jones Katherine Cone (cousin) Charles Martin Jones Richard Kent Jones John Cone (cousin)
Annandale Grammar School harboring a misfit (at left, second row), 1923
The only solution seemed to be to strike it rich. Then he could run for the hills, secure in the knowledge that his family was fiscally secure.
My father’s book on avocados
“Striking It Rich” in Southern California in the 1920s was not at all unusual. Indeed, along with the bizarre crop of intriguing new religious cults that thrived so well in our desert soil, it was a way of life. Opportunities for immediate wealth were a dime a dozen—and worth approximately that. Father tried them all, plus some introductory ideas of his own: he formed companies that attempted to sell avocados when people called them Alligator Pears and thought of them as either poisonous or Communistic or both; he offered vineyards for sale when Prohibition was in full astringent swing; he took a short option on a place called Signal Hill and tried frustratingly to grow geraniums there for the Eastern market, only to discover years later that his floral nonfecundity was caused by crude oil saturating the soil. Where flowers should have blossomed, crude-oil rigs sprouted instead, long after Father’s geraniums and options had withered away.
But—now listen—every time Father started a new business, he did three things: 1. He bought a new suit. 2. He bought acres of the finest Hammermill bond stationery, complete with the company’s letterhead. 3. He bought hundreds of boxes of pencils, also complete with the company name. (There were ashtrays so embellished, too, but this had nothing to do with my becoming an animator.) Ah, but what did have to do with my becoming an animator and my siblings becoming graphic artists is this:
EVERY TIME FATHER’S BUSINESS FAILED, HIS CHILDREN INHERITED A FRESH LEGACY OF THE FINEST DRAWING MATERIALS IMAGINABLE.
Where every other child on the block was lucky once a month to get a measly little shoddy little tablet made of measly and shoddy newsprint, probably adorned with a picture on the front cover of a dyspeptic lion or a hideous mewling child, and, if very lucky, was reluctantly doled a horrible little penny pencil about as useful for drawing as a dental pick, we Joneses were rolling in tons of lovely white bond paper and the finest Ticonderoga pencils.
NOT ONLY THAT!
We were forbidden—actually forbidden—to draw on both sides of the paper. Because, of course,
