The Willie Jones and John Paul Jones Tradition
Willie Jones lived at "The Grove," near Halifax. These old mansions, grand in their proportions, were the homes of abounding hospitality. When John Paul Jones visited Halifax, then a young sailor and a stranger, he made the acquaintance of those fine old patriots, Allen and Willie Jones; he was a young man but an old tar with a bold, frank sailor-bearing that attracted their attention. He became a frequent visitor/at their house, where he was always welcome. He soon grew fond of them, and as a mark of esteem and admiration, he adopted their name, saying that if he lived he would make them proud of it. Thus John Paul became John Paul Jones— it was his fancy. He named his ship the "Bon Homme Richard," as a compliment to Franklin; he named himself Jones as a compliment to Allen and Willie Jones. When the first notes of war sounded he obtained letters from these brothers to Joseph Hewes, member of Congress from North Carolina, and through his influence received his first commission in the navy.
Read more about this topic: Willie Jones (statesman)
Famous quotes containing the words jones, paul and/or tradition:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“When Paul Bunyan’s loggers roofed an Oregon bunkhouse with shakes, fog was so thick that they shingled forty feet into space before discovering they had passed the last rafter.”
—State of Oregon, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)