Ben Jones is the kind of person Tom Brokaw had in mind when he penned his 1998 bestselling book “The Greatest Generation” about the men and women who saved America during World War II — and then returned home to build a great and grateful nation.
Referring to those folks as “the greatest generation any society has ever produced,” Brokaw documented the life and war stories of some of the millions who, he said, in their late teens and early 20s should have been at home “filled with innocent adventure, love and the lessons of the workaday world.”
“But instead, they were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy and Austria and the coral islands of the Pacific...not for fame and recognition but because it was the right thing to do.”
Into that period of history came Cary Benjamin (“Ben”) Jones, a “‘little ol’ farm boy from Apex,” as he described himself in a 2019 News + Record story on the occasion of his 100th birthday. He died June 23 at the age of 101.
As an Army Air Corps fighter pilot, before the hostilities ended, Jones would fly 22 combat missions with the British and 80 with his countrymen against German and Italian pilots and troops over a span of 16 months. During that time, he would be shot at, shot up and shot down — and live to talk about it, then return to the states, where in 1974, he and his wife Velda built their dream home in Chatham County between Pittsboro and Siler City, where he continued in the cattle business.
That farm became, he said, a place where his soul was restored.
Jones had first tasted the beef industry after moving to California in 1940 to visit a sister. Taking a job with a bank, he also spent time helping his brother-in-law with his vegetable farming and cattle feeding business and learning the meat packing business until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He immediately went to a San Diego recruiting office, volunteered, called upon his air cadet experience as a student at N.C. State and was sworn in as an aviation cadet. After basic and advanced training, he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and sent for further training in P-40 Warhawks for overseas combat, eventually joining “Hell’s Belles,” the 316th Fighter Squadron of the 324 Flight Group.
“None of us expected to get home,” he said of his missions in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. “We knew we were there until it was over or we were killed.”
But he did survive. After returning from the war, the decorated pilot, who received a number of air medals and badges, became a test pilot in January 1944 for several military aircraft before being discharged two years later.
By this time, Jones had a family — including baby daughter Susan — and he and his family moved to El Centro, California, where he and his brother-in-law built a meat packing plant. For 25 years, he was president and manager of the company and also a partner in the cattle feeding business.
While those ventures proved successful, changes in the business world were coming fast.
“The times and business world then were changing,” Jones said on his 100th birthday, “and we had to get bigger to survive so I got out.”
And as those times changed, so did his plans for the future.
“The good Lord was still looking after this ol’ farm boy,” he remembered. “I had promised my wife not to do anything else so for awhile we traveled. But she used to say the closer I got to North Carolina, the bigger my grin got.”
In time, they began to look for property in the state; a friend suggested Chatham County.
“I wasn’t interested,” he said. “I’d been through there and seen that worn-out red clay but he said, ‘Oh, it’s changed. They’ve been fertilizing it. You ought to check it out,’ so we did.”
And the rest was history.
The land he bought was where Joe Harris grew up.
“He bought the land and I helped him perc the soil,” Harris says. “Trees were cut down and we burned an old house. Then someone filled in the hole and I sewed that ground. I knew him for 50 or 55 years. He was a fine fellow.”
After building their home, Ben and Velda were active in beef cattle farming for years until her death in 2002. And even when he finally retired from farming, other growers used his pastures for their cattle so there was seldom a time when Jones couldn’t look out his big plate glass window and see cattle grazing on the hills.
“His wife Velda, Lord, she was an angel,” Harris says, “just as good a person as Ben was. They were a terrific pair. Ben was more like an uncle to me than just somebody I knew.”
Harris remained a part of Jones’ life through the years, even to the point of providing a persimmon pudding fairly often.
“Sometimes I’d go with him to the eye doctor,” he says. “He’d drive over and I’d drive back since they dilated his eyes. Or I’d go with him to eat. All the waitresses had to hug him. They all loved him; he was generous. There was nobody like him. One time he had to have a serious operation but he told me you had to play cards with the hand you were dealt. I never saw him in a bad mood.”
Jones had several contemporaries who also raised cattle, including neighbor and friend John Etchison. They often talked shop, discussing the business.
“We had some good times,” Etchison says, “took lots of road trips. Even when he got close to a hundred, before he stopped driving, he was still a good driver. I never hesitated to ride with him.
“He was,” Etchison says, “a heck of a good man, one of the best. I thought the world of him. I miss him.” And in describing his longtime friend, Etchison used a word so many others who knew him have used — the word “gentleman.”
“But when you think about that,” Etchison says, “it’s kind of hard to put that together with what he did in combat but he was that — a real gentleman.”
Rachel Etchison echoed her husband’s thoughts, noting “Mr. Ben was super, anything you did for him he never failed to acknowledge it, to say thank you. He was always willing to share, like strawberries when he got some.”
That was, says daughter Susan, a dominant characteristic of Ben Jones. “Talking about it isn’t the same as living it” she says. “I grew up with that; he was forever a gentleman, always was that way.” But that quality isn’t the only thing she remembers about her father. “He was also such an athlete,” she says. “I was an only child and I remember standing on his palms as a child. He was very strong and worked hard all his life.”
Those athletic qualities served him well in the service, Jones said. For one thing, he had physical strength developed early from plowing with mules as a 6 year old and helping his mother supplement her teacher’s income after her husband died when Jones was 4. The family grew cotton, wheat, oats and soybeans and raised poultry, hogs and cattle.
But there were also lessons learned playing on various high school and college teams. At Apex High School, Jones ran track, boxed and played football, basketball and baseball. At North Carolina State, he lettered in baseball and football, earning the nickname “Jackrabbit Jones” for his speed and agility.
“When I look back,” he once said, “there’s nothing that helped me more than playing football. It taught me how important teamwork is and taught me to make a decision quickly and it needed to be the right decision when you make it.”
Despite his age, Jones maintained a keen interest in affairs of the nation and the world, watching those activities on his iPad. And he retained his lifelong interest in the agricultural world. Longtime friend and fellow pilot Mike Grigg was the other half of many conversations.
“We talked about lots of things,” Grigg said from his home in Beaufort, where he moved a few years ago. “We talked almost every afternoon and how the nation was going today blew his mind, especially after what he did in life. We about figured out that much of the unrest comes from young folks brainwashed at college.”
Griggs described his relationship with Jones the way many others did.
“He was a friend, a father figure, a mentor, a man’s man,” he says. “I never met anyone who didn’t like him or remember him. He wasn’t big in stature but he was a big man, a special guy, unique.”
The tales about Army life that Jones told Grigg and others are almost legend. There was the time he bailed out of his plane upside down because of a fire in the cockpit. That particular escape was because there were no ejection seats in aircraft of those days and many pilots were often struck by the tail of their own plane. On that particular day, Jones remembered, his parachute was slow to open and he prayed he wouldn’t be conscious when he hit the ground. It finally opened in time for him to see his plane crash in a French farmer’s field, setting it on fire.
Then there was his first combat mission where he came face to face with the reality of his situation.
“When they started shooting at me,” he once said, “I thought ‘they’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill my mama’s baby boy.’ It gave you a different perspective.”
Despite his successful record, Grigg says, Jones was a “very humble man” but that, too, was a childhood trait that endured through his life.
“I remember him saying one day after he’d been in cadet school for a while, a soldier came up to him and gave him some money. Ben asked him what it was for and the soldier said ‘It’s your pay.’ And Ben said, ‘You mean we get paid for doing this?’’He was a patriotic man.”
As life moved along, Jones acquired more family — stepsons, grandchildren, great grandchildren, nieces, great-nieces and nephews and cousins — and even more friends. A special friend, daughter Susan Brock says, was “his dear companion” of many years, Jean Watkins. “The past few years with Jean was a bonus chapter in Dad’s life. If not for her, I don’t know that he would have had the will to keep going. She was such a friend.”
“There were so many good things about Ben,” Watkins says. “We enjoyed simple things — rides in the country, watching sunsets through his big window, being with friends. It was really so comfortable. I couldn’t ask for anyone to be any nicer to me; I hope I was to him.”
It was the gentle nature of Ben Jones that drew folks to him. Several friends referred to him as a “gentleman and a gentle man.”
“We never had a disagreement,” Watkins says. “We used to say we wished everyone could be this comfortable in a relationship.
“He was always happy,” she added. “He often said he loved waking up in the morning knowing he had another day. Before he died, he told me, ‘I’ll never be without you. When you go for a ride in the country, I’ll be in the seat next to you. When you see a sunset, I’ll be there.’ He did so much for so many people and did it without recognition; he didn’t want any.”
Jones loved flying and he often told people it broadened his understanding of life. “I go up in the sky,” he says, “and see those clouds and experience how close to God I feel and then I look down and realize how insignificant we all are.”
Ben Jones answered his final roll call on June 23. He was 101.
“If Uncle Ben isn’t in Heaven,” Joe Harris says, “the rest of us don’t have a chance.”
