Eddie Jones, the former editor of The Nashville Banner, died earlier this week at the age of 85. He was a legendary journalist and civic leader who helped make Nashville the city it is today….In a day and age when newspapers are shutting down every other day, all it takes is a look at Eddie Jones’ life to understand the reason they are so important to everyone….
A friend and colleague of The Real Walrus, in a contribution to The Nashville Scene, summed up Eddie Jones the man and journalist……
By TIM GHIANNI
Eddie Jones was my friend, a fellow whose counsel I sought during my years at the Nashville Banner and in the years since.
He was a true local journalist, whose roots in Nashville were reflected in the stories and the headlines in the still-lamented afternoon daily newspaper.
He was the kind of editor who would roll up his always-pressed shirtsleeves to be a part of what was going on in the newsroom. He was the kind of editor who stood behind his staff rather than stab them in the back.
It’s not that he thought his staff was incapable of error, but when he knew they were right, he’d fight right beside them. And if they were wrong, he’d help them patch things up.
When I was state editor at the Banner, a part of my responsibility was political coverage. Sometimes, not every day, but frequently, we pissed off the politicians. If they came to Eddie, complaining, he wouldn’t back down. Rather in his inimitable and diplomatic fashion, he would defuse the problem. Handshakes all around were his hoped-for result.
It should be noted that some of those stories, of course, emanated from Eddie, who knew everything and everyone who made decisions affecting the city and the state that he loved.
He also encouraged me to write a slice-of-life column that appeared once a week in the Banner. “Real Life” was often gritty and it detailed the lives and concerns of the working man and woman in Nashville. No, the people I wrote about generally weren’t part of any marketing department’s demographic of the people we should write about in order to sell more papers. I didn’t have to explain to him that these people mattered, that they shared the same hopes, fears and dreams as everyone else. That column — whether it was about a homeless man, a victim of street violence or even about the mother of a vice president — was to show that we were all more alike than different.
It fit Eddie’s philosophy of life as much as it fit my own.
There are great memories in any newsman’s life. With Eddie, perhaps it was the trip to Washington, D.C., we took to meet with the delegation and to orchestrate coverage of Capitol Hill. The stories he told me over drinks and steak detailed a life spent covering things like Hank Williams’ funeral and various political shenanigans.
If pressed, he would talk about his years at East High and his job as a World War II fighter pilot. Yes, to him, it was a job he was doing when he was helping to defeat the fascists. He was no more heroic than any other veteran, he would say.
“Us World War II’s are pretty tough,” he conceded with a smile.
But he was equally interested in my own life as a journalist, as a writer and as a human being.
I was standing outside 1100 Broadway, enjoying a pre-budget-meeting smoke at about 5:30 one morning in February 1998. “What brings you in so early, boss?” I asked, as he crossed Broadway and stopped to finish up his own smoke before going inside.
He turned his thumbs toward the asphalt.
“The Banner’s going down,” he said. There was melancholy in his voice as he talked about the imminent death of the newspaper that he’d been a part of, on and off, through his adult life.
The Banner has been gone now for more than a decade. It is impossible to think about that newspaper without thinking about Eddie Jones. This weekend we lost the man who perhaps loved that newspaper more than anyone else. Eddie was one of the good guys.
