The StoryCorps Mobile Tour returned to Fort Myers in February and March 2024 to record meaningful conversations with people right here in Southwest Florida about their lives.
Each Monday, we’re highlighting some of the compelling stories from our fellow Southwest Florida residents.
In this installment, we hear Joan Jones and her husband of 50 years, Dick Jones, talk about how the influence of their own parents fostered a life-long curiosity about the world, and how that shaped their lives traveling all over the globe, in large part, due to Dick’s work with the American Diplomatic Corps.
Transcript:
JOAN JOANS: I was the youngest of four kids, all born after World War II, but that had an influence on me. I lost one set of grandparents and an uncle to the Holocaust, but I think that made my parents more mature. By the time he had kids, my mother was English and went through the Blitz in London, so she also had seen a lot, and that was a great thing for us as children to have mature parents. When I was born, my sister and I, the only two actually born as an American citizen, we were overseas, and my father had become an American diplomat, so I spent my life as a child until the age of 18, growing up in different places with my immigrant parents as an American.
JACK JONES: Well, World War II also had a big impact on my life. My father was a military officer. He'd been a reserve officer, so he wasn't in the military, but because of World War II, he was activated, and ended up liking it, and ended up staying in the Air Force, actually, until he was retired because of his age. But before I was three, he was sent to Korea. Then when I was seven, he was sent to Vietnam for a little over a year. So, I was eight and a half, I think, when he came back. But when he was in Vietnam, I was already precocious enough that I could read and write pretty well, and so we corresponded when he was over there, and he sent pictures and he wrote letters about his experiences. So, I grew up knowing that there was a big world out there, and it made me want to go out and explore it.
JOAN: For me, I didn't really realize that people didn't all grow up the way I did until I was about 10 or 12, and we happened to be back in the States.
JACK: You know, not knowing that everybody wasn't like you; I learned that early on, because with my dad being posted overseas and military assignments are pretty short term Anyway. I moved seven times by the time I was 10 years old, and I moved around in our country.
JOAN: I had only moved four times by the time I was 10, so I was much more stable in my moving around.
JACK: In Topeka, I was part of the first class that was integrated after Brown versus the Board of Education. I started kindergarten in 1955. There was only one black family in our district, but they had two or three kids, and one of them was another kindergartner. His name was Skippy. I'm sure that wasn't his real name, but that's what we all called him. And he was a lot of fun, and he and I were buddies. We used to race each other at recess and stuff like that, but I really liked Skippy. And then I went and spent time in Alabama, and I saw how Black people lived in Alabama at that time, and it was pretty shocking to me. I saw tar paper shacks, people living in cars, and I heard all the races stuff. And in Kansas, race really wasn't much of an issue. Obviously, there had been segregation, but when they integrated, everybody took it in stride. Alabama was a different story then. So, I grew up knowing there are big differences even within our own country, as well as overseas.
JOAN: Well, I was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and then when I was one, we moved to suburban Washington to Pine Ridge, Virginia in Fairfax County. And then before kindergarten it was back to Bonn, Germany, and then a direct transfer to Vienna, Austria. And then in the middle of sixth grade, I went to suburban New York and learned for the first time that unlike the schools, the American international schools I had been to, which I later learned the word is ‘diversity,’ was full of people from different countries, and I didn't know the difference, except by their personality, that there were cliques in America. At least in our school, there were tracks, and people came from different sides of the tracks.
JACK: I mentioned that I became interested in the world outside, and when I was in college, somebody told me about the Foreign Service, which is the formal name of America's Diplomatic Corps.
JOAN: We went to Paris with very little money, very little support from the embassy or the US mission to the OECD where Dick worked, and they didn't recognize my license because we didn't recognize theirs, because they don't get psychiatry in their training like we do. So, I couldn't work as an RN. I was anxious to keep working, and so I eventually built up my own entrepreneur job, which was teaching childbirth preparation classes, which was a lot of fun, and there was quite a market, because that's included in the French healthcare for pregnant families. After that, you get a list of choices of where to go. We decided to head to the Arab world. We went to Saudi Arabia for two years?
JACK: And I was a petroleum officer in the embassy in Riyadh. It was interesting learning about it, such an alien culture, learning about Islam and also learning about life in an embassy overseas. And then it was time to go back to Washington. I worked on a lot of trade negotiations, including the free trade agreement with Canada, which was the predecessor for NAFTA, which was the predecessor for the current America, Canada, Mexico agreement.
JOAN: And I just want to kind of end up with something about a 50 plus year marriage, which is not common and not that easy, but it takes certain judgment when you start and as you go along, and definite commitment. It's always helpful to feel like you're working together as partners to a greater good in having grown up in the Foreign Service, and I knew what Dick was getting into better than he did.
DICK: That's for sure.
JOAN: But hopefully it would have some positive impact on the world in the future. But ultimately, whatever you do, you have to have a little faith in a greater force, because otherwise, you're not going to be very happy. You're going to be burdened with responsibility and feel like you have to control things when ultimately you really can't.
JACK: Yeah.
JOHN DAVIS, HOST: That was Joan Jones and her husband of 50 years, Dick Jones. Their conversation was recorded in Fort Myers through the StoryCorps Mobile Tour. This is WGCU News.
WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.
