Early Years and Business Success
Jones was the third of six children born to Swedish immigrants and naturalized citizens, Alfred and Elsa Jones. He spent his early years on the family homestead east of Billings, the largest city in Montana, on the Huntley Project, an irrigation showcase. In 1928, he graduated from Huntley Project High School. The area is now referred to as the unincorporated community of Huntley in Yellowstone County. Jones visited Sweden on several occasions and also took his five grandchildren to meet their European relatives.
As a young man, Jones worked for the railroad and delivered milk in Billings. He started the first trucking company in Casper in eastern Wyoming. In 1932, he married his high school sweetheart, the former Estes "Jackie" Clarke, and the couple had three children. Estes died in 1984, and two years later, Jones married the former Evelyn Nelson. In 1935, Jones purchased a one-truck freight company in Powell, the original Dick Jones Trucking. A son, grandson, and a granddaughter work in the business. For many years, the company was based in Cody, but it returned in 2001 to Powell, where Jones had been elected to the city council in 1940 and as mayor in 1950.
Read more about this topic: Dick Jones (Wyoming Politician)
Famous quotes containing the words early, years, business and/or success:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“With care, and skill, and cunning art,
She parried Time’s malicious dart,
And kept the years at bay,
Till passion entered in her heart
And aged her in a day!”
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919)
“Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these,—but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust,—some of them suicides.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)