Retired California TV reporter Celeste Durant remembers Bob Jones as the tireless researcher who sat nearby in the LA Times newsroom in the early 1970s, and became a lifelong friend. “This was at the height of (Publisher) Otis Chandler wanting to make the LA Times a world-class newspaper,” Durant said. “He was hiring really talented people and giving them free rein to write in-depth stories.”
Jones was one of those talented people. He was particularly proud of a story he helped break in 1985 about Mormon rare-document hunter Mark Hofmann, perhaps best known for unearthing the “Salamander Letter,” which raised questions about the church’s official version of its history. In 1987, when Hoffman admitted to forging the letter and setting off three bombs in an attempt to cover up that and other misdeeds (two people died), Jones published a lengthy, two-part series that told the full story. Here he is explaining why historic documents matter so much to the church:
Alone among all the major religions, Mormonism’s roots lie in the recent past, not mythological time. After all, Joseph Smith died slightly more than a century ago. His life was littered with personal letters, contracts, court proceedings, and all of these can — and often are — used to scrutinize his claims to divine inspiration. Thus, acquiring a credible account of its divine origins has become the church’s great obsession and its peculiar vulnerability. It is as if Jesus Christ’s claim of rising from the sepulcher could be challenged by motel receipts showing he had checked into a Holiday Inn the same day. For Mormonism, that threat is always present.
Jones’ son, Casey, remembers his dad as a guy who loved the outdoors. Once, he led Casey and a group of Boy Scouts on a backpacking trip to the top of California’s highest peak, Mount Whitney. “He was a big road-tripper,” Casey said. “We went to Yosemite, Yellowstone. We went to Utah and hit all the national parks.”
Jones had a special love for the Grand Canyon. He did multiple river trips through the canyon, the last when he was in his 70s.
He was originally from Memphis, Tennessee, but his love for the Western landscape inspired him to move out here. And it was that love that led him to push his editors to let him tackle what was then a brand-new beat: the environment. “He was one of the first environmental reporters around,” Durant recalled.
That beat took Jones all over the world, from the Amazon to the Pacific Islands to Alaska. The Arctic had a particular hold on his dad, Casey said: “He talked about all the shades of the ice; it was pink in places, and green.”
Jones wrote about the wild creatures of LA, too, including ants, crows, rats, and a certain “big brown creature” that crashed through his front window one day when he was at work. Casey, 5 at the time, was home with a babysitter. Jones wrote a column about it:
Around 2 p.m. the baby-sitter called and her voice seemed icily calm.
You should come home, she said.
Why’s that, I asked.
There’s an owl in the living room.
Tut tut, I replied. You are a grown woman. Remove the owl and be done with it.
The owl is very large, she said.
In the background I began to hear crashing noises. It sounded like a bar brawl in progress.
Where’s Casey? I asked…
Hiding under the bed in his room, she said. And barricaded.
I will come home, I said.
In his Times obituary, a former colleague said that Jones wrote “with the precision and artful control of a journalistic jeweler.”
Jones died in 2019 after a struggle with lung cancer. In his will, he named environmental groups including American Rivers, the Grand Canyon Trust and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. And this summer, we learned that he also left a sizable bequest to High Country News.
Some of Jones’ generous gift will go to pay HCN’s remarkable community of journalists, who are, in many ways, following in his footsteps. The rest will go into our reserves to serve as an insurance policy so that we can pay our reporters even if catastrophe strikes. We’re beyond grateful. And sorry that we never had the chance to meet this wonderful man in person.
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