The Many Faces of Will Jones
Will Jones was a long-time Minneapolis Tribune columnist. He was born in 1924 in Dover, Ohio “with the smell of groceries in his nose--upstairs over his Grandmother Ringheimer’s grocery store.” In Ohio he began writing editorials for various newspapers, eventually making his way to the Minneapolis Tribune when he transferred to the University of Minnesota. In 1947 Jones began covering entertainment for the Tribune in a column called “After Last Night,” which included restaurant and food reviews. In 1961 Jones took his good taste and good humor up a notch in Wild in the Kitchen, a cookbook featuring his favorite recipes including “au gratin potatoes that take three days,” Fuji-Ya’s Kushiyaki, Fran Naftalin’s spinach and ricotta balls, the Hotel Leamington’s beer and cheese soup, and more.
In addition to reviewing restaurants, movies, music, and other forms of entertainment, he enjoyed writing first-person accounts of the famous, including his “13 wonderful dates with Broadway beauties” series in 1951. Jones was also an early advocate for keeping public spaces smoke-free.
Jones quit the Minneapolis Star and Tribune in 1984 after 37 years at the paper, reportedly because of a negative job evaluation (he never showed up to work in the office, and preferred to work from home). He died on September 1, 2004, at the age of 80. His memory lives on in decades of newspaper bylines, many of which can be discovered in the Star Tribune’s archive or in clippings at the HCL Special Collections.
Photos of Will Jones from the Minneapolis Newspaper Photographs Collection in the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections. Newspaper sketches from the Will Jones biography/clipping file.
