Toads Over 80: "Tom Jones" Interview

An Interview By Theresa Schorr

When the editors  were coming up with the different categories we wanted for this publication we all agreed to having a section dedicated to getting to know the generations before us. We wanted to have a place where we remember the history and stories that are gathered in their lifetime. Naturally our first choice was “Tom Jones.” This is not his name, but the name he gave us for this interview. “Tom Jones” is a dearly loved person to the local Joplin community.  Whenever he enters one of the many establishments he frequents, people smile and call out his name. There’s always a story or an article he’s read that he loves to share with you if you listen. He flashes a smile whenever you ask him where he got his great hat or fun mug.

As I sat down for this interview I intended to ask him a list of questions, but I soon realized that he was ready to run with the stories of his life, so I let him run. This interview is slightly different, it’s more of a narrative of a man who we love, and I hope you enjoy reading some of these stories as much as I did hearing them.

Ladies and gentlemen, “Tom Jones”

“Well whaddya know!”

I once had a newspaper route, did that morning and evening, and I worked for the western union delivering telegrams for a year or two. See then the war came along, World War II, in the 1940s. I got a job working at a machine shop, and I worked there for several years. When I first started working there it was mostly just clean up work, working on brake shoes, and this and that. They had some courses in the machine shop for blacksmithing and welding, well I took a course of blacksmithing, it was really elementary and of course that is kind of a bygone art now.

    I had a friend who moved to California, I don’t remember how I got started doing this but I decided to hitchhike to California with another boy, and we found out right quick that two boys don’t get a ride, only one boy could get a ride. You might say that was kinda the glory days of hitchhiking because nowadays people won’t pick up a hitchhiker because there has been some foul play and it’s against the law in some places. But in days gone by people would feel obligated to pick people up and give them a ride, whether they had a wagon or whether it was a car they’d pick you up in whatever they had. So we hitchhiked to California back and forth several times. And you know why most people picked us up in those days? Believe it or not, it was to help them drive. You see then it took a lot longer to get there than it does now cause the roads weren’t near as good as they are now. See between here and Los Angeles it was a lot of dirt back in those days in the early 40’s we had a lot of fun going back and forth but now people are afraid to pick you up, for good reason.

    One time after I had hitchhiked over to California and visited a boy in Hollywood who had given me a ride, I decided to go from there up to Alaska to see some of my relatives. I hitchhiked up to Seattle and got a ticket for a boat that went up there to Anchorage. Anchorage had a railroad that went north to Fairbanks. I got on the train and the whole ride you were shaking all over because the railroad tracks were in such bad shape. Anyway, I got up to Fairbanks and visited my relatives for a little while. I got a summer job there with a gold mining company working on a dredge.

    I decided to go to college up there one year at the University of Alaska, I signed up for mining engineering and got a job in the grocery store delivering groceries. They had the coldest winter they had in awhile, it got down to 60 below. I read a piece in the paper recently of people moaning about 30 below being too cold, and I’ve heard some old-timers say that 30 below isn’t too cold because you don’t frost your lungs when you go out running with the dogs. I had some relatives that lived out on a homestead in Fairbanks. And one night I got off work around christmas and I was gonna go spend the day and a half with them for Christmas. It was running  about 30 below then so I put on my eskimo garb and started walking the 35 miles, figured I’d get there about 2 in the morning. I got down the road about 10 miles and this ol’ boy picked me up and took me the rest of the way down there.

    I met my wife here in Joplin, she was going to school here. We got married around 1950 I guess, it was so long ago I can hardly remember. She taught school for a little while and I served a year in the army. I was drafted and about two weeks later they changed the law, and it didn’t cover me so I was only supposed to serve two years. The ones after the law changed had to serve till the war was over and then had to be in the reserves the rest of their life. So I did not have to go to Vietnam or the reserves. I kinda lucked out on that. When I got out of the army my wife quit teaching school.

   I’ve kinda come and gone from Joplin over the years, and I don’t live in Joplin now, I live out in the country. When we were younger we wanted our kids to go to school in Joplin so we lived over on North Byers. I worked in the highway department for awhile and we were renting a little house for $40 a month. We had 7 kids so we moved into a different house and it was so big my kids could play badminton across the room. Back then I remember down on 4th street, across from where the bowling alley is now, the houses right there could be rented for $1 a week. Times have changed now, and the economy has changed a lot. You could live off of $8-$10 a week. The groceries were cheaper then too. I eat a lot of veggies now, I eat beets almost everyday, course canned ones are the ones that are normally available. I have a set of teeth, but I’m too lazy to use them. So I just put everything in a blender at home, and everything comes out soupy.

    When I was little I used to eat a lot of cornbread. Grandma used to make cornmeal pancakes and we’d pour a little sugar on them and milk, at least I thought it was milk. Well, a few years ago I decided that I would have some cornmeal pancakes, I had put the sugar on them and then poured the milk, and it just didn’t taste right. Well six or seven months later I tried it again and it still didn’t taste right. Then one day it was around christmas time, and the girls had been making something with whipped cream, and I decided I would try to make them again. So I grabbed the carton of whipped cream and poured it on there cause that’s all we had, and there you had it, it was grandmas cornmeal pancakes. I realized what I had been doing when I was little, my grandmas milk would sit there and that cream would rise to the top of the pitcher and I would pour it on those pancakes, so I was getting almost pure cream on there, and it took me almost ten years to figure that out.”