“I don’t make a whole lot of my birthdays, but they want to do it, and I let them” Jones said about her family’s birthday celebrations.
She said the only time she let her family throw her a birthday party was for her 95th birthday, but that doesn’t stop family and friends from calling her with birthday wishes.
“My phone started ringing yesterday, and it’s been ringing all the morning” Jones said. “Just one after another.
Jones grew up in LaGrange, Georgia. She lived on the same street as her first husband, George Ogletree, who would go on to serve in World War II, corresponding with her during the war through letters home. After he served and shortly after they got married, Jones and her husband moved to Dayton. She was 27, having left LaGrange because of what she said was increased Klu Klux Klan activity.
Jones said goodbye to her close-knit family, which included five brothers and five sisters, and came to Dayton. For their first year in Dayton, while Jones did domestic work, she and her husband stayed in one room with his aunt and uncle.
“They spread a sheet between them and us, and that’s the way we stayed for a while, before we could find somewhere else to live,” she said.
Credit: Jim Noelker
Credit: Jim Noelker
Even so, Jones looks back fondly on the Dayton she found as a young woman. She reminisced about how “neighborly” the city used to feel, noting that “when something happened to a person, all the neighbors would get together and see about that person.”
Jones and her first husband shared a love of gardening, with Ogletree dreaming of having a big lawn to maintain even before they got married. She described the garden she grew with Ogletree before his death, which was twice honored by the city.
“I had a beautiful patio with flowers all around,” Jones said. “After (Ogletree) died, my garden went down because he loved to work in the yard.”
LaGrange met her second husband, William Jones, when she was around 70 and he visited a family reunion.
“I had two good husbands,” she said.
Jones had one son, Carl, with her first husband. She also has two grandsons, Christopher and George.
Jones’ grandson, George, describes her as a “true believer in Christ.” Jones herself says she feels “blessed” to have lived as long as she has. In 2006, Jones’ doctors found a large, inoperable tumor in her abdomen and feared she wouldn’t live much longer. It has shrunk since her diagnosis, she said.
“And that tumor,” she said, “has not given me one bit of trouble.”
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