Toads Over 80: "Tom Jones" Interview (Article)

Interview by theresa schorr
Photographs by John Laude

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 kinda collect stories. I once had a newspaper route, did that morning and evening, and I worked for the western union delivering telegrams for oh, another 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…