Writing the Next Chapter of His Life
/
Twenty years ago, when a FedEx courier handed Ken Jones a package containing a book he’d ordered from a small bookstore in South Africa, he had no idea that he’d just been handed the inspiration for his first novel. Indeed, he had no idea that he would ever be an author.
The events described in that book, a love letter tucked inside the pages of that book, and his partnership with an Egyptian businessman all came together in one incredible story - a story Ken knew in his heart needed to be told.
Many years later, after several twists and turns in his life, and with some encouragement from the woman who believed he was the person to tell the story, Ken Jones published his first book at age 83.
Through his book, Letters from the Skeleton Coast, Ken has written the final chapter of an unspoken and unrealized love story between a young Scottish woman shipwrecked on the coast of Africa during WWII and the daring South African pilot who came to rescue her and her fellow passengers. It was a love story that survived for more than six decades in the hearts of two people who fate brought together for a moment in time - and who never again saw one another when that moment passed.
—
Ken Jones and his wife Sandy Hunter Jones are long-time Flat Rock residents living in Kenmure. The couple has been married for 13 years and Sandy did not know Ken at the time the details of the love story described in his book were coming to light. In fact, much of the book centers around Ken’s late wife Joanne who was a close confidant of the woman at the center of the incredible tale.
Ken and SAndy Hunter Jones
Nevertheless, it is Sandy who is perhaps the most important reason the story was ever written at all. “I give Sandy complete credit for the book,” Ken confesses. And then he adds with a smile, "She can be very persistent." Fortunately for all of us who enjoy a great love story, Sandy’s persistence was the motivation that moved Ken’s idea from an intriguing idea to a published reality.
—
Ken Jones was born and raised in Oklahoma City, a depression-era child with an older brother, a devoted mother, and a father he describes as a “straight arrow” who taught his young son many important lessons.
Ken vividly recalls the Victory Garden on a vacant lot in his childhood neighborhood during WWII. His father galvanized the neighbors to start the garden and initially there was a lot of support for the project. But as the summer dragged on, Ken found himself alone with his father chopping weeds on Saturday mornings. When Ken complained, his father explained that there are two kinds of people in the world - doers and producers on one side and talkers and takers on the other. “That was all he said and he never mentioned it again,” recalls Ken. “But it left an indelible impression on me as a nine-year-old boy.”
Ken’s Father, John Nathan Jones
Indeed, Ken Jones took his father’s words to heart and within a few years embarked on a career of extraordinary doing and producing.
Ken was an accomplished athlete in high school and his talent was impressive enough to garner an invitation to a summer tryout camp hosted by the St. Louis Cardinals. Although his father was skeptical, he let Ken take his shot at the big leagues. Ken was a great fielder but his eyesight was suspect and he “couldn’t hit a curveball.” Within a few weeks, his “Field of Dreams” moment had come and gone and Ken traded his glove for textbooks at the University of Oklahoma.
In college, Ken studied Petroleum Management and applied for an ROTC assignment while at school. “There was still a draft and ROTC graduates would enter the army as Lieutenants instead of privates,” Ken explains. But his weak eyesight proved insufficient and he failed the eyesight portion of his physical.
Disappointed but not dissuaded, Ken lingered in the examination room and when the sergeant left the room, wrote down the letters on the eye chart. A week later he was back for a second attempt at the eye exam and this time his eyesight had suddenly "improved" to 20-20. Ken Jones’ set his sights on a military experience that would be instrumental in much of his later success.
It was also during college that Ken met his first wife, Jenny - although under tragic circumstances. Jenny was the girlfriend of a classmate who was killed in a Naval ROTC training accident in Florida in 1953. “Jenny was a friend and kind of lost after Wayne died. We just grew together after that.”
Following college, Ken began working for Continental Oil but was called to active military service in the Army just 18 months later. Ken credits his weak eyesight and college education for an assignment at Fort Harrison in accounting school. He eventually found himself surrounded by military brass when he was sent to be part of a Combat Development Experimentation Center.
Still in his early 20s, Ken worked in the company of much older and much more senior members of the military. It was an experience that would serve him well in his subsequent business career. “I played tennis with General Maxwell Taylor (who later served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and if I was ever going to be intimidated that was the time.”
Ken and Jenny were married in 1956 and eventually had three boys together - Kevin, Stuart, and Andrew. Following his two-year military commitment, Ken returned to Continental Oil and served as an assistant to the company CEO. As his career progressed, he was sent to Lafayette, Louisiana where he spent a short time with Continental before joining Midwest Oil as a manager. He recalls meeting a famous oilman “wildcatter” by the name of Jimmie Owen. “Jimmie was rich one day and poor the next,” Ken recalls with a grin. “But we’d talk often and those conversations were priceless. An older mentor sharing his experiences.”
In his mid-thirties, Ken’s oil career reached an inflection point when Continental Oil reentered the picture with the purchase of Midwest Oil. Ken was faced with a decision of whether he would return to his previous company or strike out on his own. He opted for the latter - a decision that set him on the path to a highly successful career.
—
Burt Keenan (L) and Ken Jones in the early days of Offshore Logistics, Inc.
After deciding to work as an independent oilman, Ken was approached by his future business partner, Burt Keenan, who wanted Ken to join him in a new venture ferrying oilmen to the offshore oil rigs that were starting to pop up in the Gulf of Mexico. Ken demurred but agreed to share an office space with the young entrepreneur to help keep their office expenses to a minimum. It was 1968 and Ken was 35. Burt was 31.
Burt persisted and eventually convinced Ken to go in with him in the new venture which they called Offshore Logistics, Inc. Very quickly, their first two crew boats grew into a fleet of 13 vessels by the end of 1969. The following year, the company had its first public offering and by the end of 1970, the fledgling company had a fleet of 34 boats and over 200 employees. In oil terms, Ken and Burt had hit a financial gusher.
The explosive growth continued - as did oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico - when more and more and more floating oil rigs populated the productive waters of the Gulf region. Since crews were paid for their travel to and from the rigs, it was a business where time was money, and the speed and efficiency of Offshore Logistics continued to attract more and more clients.
By 1972, the company had gone international with operations in Southeast Asia and Ken and Burt took the next big step and decided to add helicopters as another and quicker means of ferrying crews to offshore rigs. Their first thought was to merge their boat operation with an existing helicopter service based in Louisiana. The owner of that company was not interested and promised to put the young businessmen out of business if they dared take him on as a competitor.
Sitting in a restaurant in New Orleans, Ken looked across the table at the powerful businessman who just promised to put him out of business. Ken Jones was at a crossroads in his career. Taking a moment and a deep breath, he replied “Well Mr. Suggs, if we decide to be in the helicopter business we’ll just do that on our own.” With that, Air Logistics (AirLog) was born.
Servicing a drilling and production facility in trinidad
Within 10 years the business was truly international with operations in Southeast Asia, the North Sea, South America, Africa and Alaska. The fleet of boats numbered 113 and AirLog operated 130 helicopters. Ken Jones was on top of the world. Unfortunately, that was about to change.
In the fall of 1979, Ken was on a business trip to Italy when he got an urgent call. Jenny had gone to the doctor where a routine x-ray revealed a large mass in her lung that appeared to be spreading to her spine and her brain. Jenny was in the operating room when Ken took the call in Italy. Ken rushed back to the States but when he arrived the operation had confirmed the worst. Jenny died on December 4th, 1979. Ken Jones was a widower with three grown boys at age 46.
—
In the late 1970s during a visit to an oil rig in the North Atlantic to get photographs for the company’s annual report, Ken met Joanne who worked for the company responsible for the maintenance of the rig. It was a notable meeting in that Ken had never seen a woman on a drilling rig. Years later and after Jenny’s death, Ken was introduced to an attractive woman at a Lafayette cocktail party by a mutual friend. She smiled and asked Ken, “How did those photographs turn out?” Having crossed paths with Joanne a second time, Ken resolved not to lose touch with her this time.
Their relationship blossomed and Ken and Joanne were married in 1981. Ken Jones didn’t realize it at the time, but Joanne would play a central role in this future as an author - 35 years later.
By 1985, Ken was stepping back from the intensity of his business. At its peak, Air Logistics had 550 helicopters and 3500 employees. He and Joanne purchased a home in Maine with the intent of sailing between a summer home there and a winter home in Hilton Head. The sailing was enjoyable but slow and the couple ultimately spent the next 15 years largely in Maine. But Maine was never intended to be a permanent move and by the mid-1990s they were on the lookout for a new home.
Ken and Joanne Jones on their last Cruise together
Ken had seen an ad for a new golf course community in Hendersonville and the couple decided to take a look. Ken’s three boys had been campers at Camp Mondamin in nearby Tuxedo so he was familiar area but wasn’t sure Joanne would take to a town sometimes described as “Hooterville.” She surprised him. “She loved the setting and everything about the area,” Ken recalls.
House plans were drawn up and Ken and Joanne met with the developers to discuss next steps. They were dismayed to learn, however, that their plans did not conform to the neighborhood building covenants and that major changes would have to be made in their design.
Not inclined to be told what he could and could not do, Ken and Joanne left that meeting and drove straight to Kenmure in Flat Rock. That day they found a house they liked and negotiated a deal with the owners over the phone. “It was probably the most irrational thing I’ve ever done,” Ken laughs. “ And it turned out to be the absolutely the right thing to do.”
Joanne and Ken moved to Kenmure in 1997 and lived there very happily for the next 12 years. But tragedy found Ken again when Joanne was diagnosed with breast cancer. After many years of treatment, the cancer worsened and by 2007, doctors gave her only a couple of years to live. Before she passed, however, it was Joanne who provided the inspiration for Ken’s first and second books.
—
During the heyday of Air Logistics, Ken became a business partner and friend of Omar Ryad who helped Ken establish an operation in Egypt. Omar’s wife, Caroline, and his mother-in-law, Alison had been passengers on a ship in 1942 that wrecked on the coast of Namibia - when Alison was 22 and Caroline just a baby. The ship was the Dunedin Star and it was the subject of the book that Ken ordered from the bookstore in South Africa.
Alison and Joanne Jones had become fast friends and near the end of Alison’s life - she was 83 in 2003 - she confided to Joanne that she’d never been completely content in her marriage to the Egyptian doctor who spirited her away from her native Scotland. She also told Joanne about the dramatic month the survivors of the shipwreck spent on the coast of Africa waiting to be rescued.
It was during that month that Alison met - and fell in love with - Russell Townsend. Townsend was a South African pilot who came to rescue the passengers and crew but became stranded himself when his plane sank into the sandy soil of the coastal area known as the Skeleton Coast. Over the course of the next several weeks, an intimate bond between the pilot and the young Scottish woman developed. Unspoken. Unrealized. But very real.
On Christmas Day 1942, the overland convoy that rescued the castaways finally reached civilization and the couple prepared to continue their journeys - Alison and her young family to Egypt and Russell back to South Africa. Before they departed, Alison and Russell shared a few moments together and then they parted ways. Alison wrote in her journal that day, “It is the saddest moment I can ever remember.”
Alison and Russell would never see each other again. But the story does not end there. Ken’s book recounts the details of the improbable connection with the South African pilot who went on to own a bookstore - and how Joanne orchestrated a final exchange of letters between the star-crossed lovers - just months before Russell died.
The story was so incredible on so many levels, Ken believed that the story should be made into a movie. He even went so far as to pitch the idea to a prominent screenwriter who lived in Asheville at the time. The writer was intrigued but ultimately determined that in the days of high action, high drama blockbusters, the days of movies about sentimental love stories had passed.
The idea was never far from Ken’s mind, but Joanne’s illness and his grief after her death stalled the project. Enter Sandy Hunter Jones. A diminutive woman with an outsized personality and the conviction to state her opinions - one of those opinions being that her husband needed to finally write his book.
—
Sandy and Ken met at St. John in the Wilderness in a study group discussing C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. They spent a summer sharing Tuesday night potluck dinners as part of the study group. When the study concluded, Ken joked with Sandy he wasn’t sure what he was going to do for dinner on Tuesday nights. Sandy had an answer for him. “I could just fix dinner at my house.” “What time?” was Ken’s immediate reply.
Ken and Sandy were married in 2010 resulting in a happy union and the resurrection of the dormant idea for his book.
It was Sandy’s insistence that Ken attend a writer’s conference. “I was the oldest person there by a long shot,” explains Ken. But another reader saw the outline of his story and encouraged him to pursue the book. With the tenacity that characterized a long and successful business career, Ken Jones published Letters from the Skeleton Coast in 2017. At an age when most people are quietly winding down, Ken Jones had launched a second career. Author.
Letters from the Skeleton Coast was followed the next year by The Black Pearl Necklace, a memoir based on the journal kept by Joanne during the couple’s final cruise together in the South Sea. The onset of the pandemic created even more time for writing and Ken resolved to tell the story of his career as an entrepreneur and international businessman in his third book, The Bayou Boys, which was published in 2022.
Now 89, three books would seem a reasonable body of work for a man who started just six years prior. Ken Jones, however, may not be finished with his writing. He is currently contemplating a new book that opens during the 1946 World Series between his beloved St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox.
—
Ken’s eyesight might not have been up to the major leagues, but his heart and determined spirit have carried him to heights he could never have imagined as a young child of the depression. His has been a fascinating life full of accomplishment, great loves, many triumphs, but also terrible heartache. When asked if he ever felt that life had been unfair at times, his reply is an apt reflection of his character. “I never felt like, ‘Why me?’ I actually just feel gratitude for having the opportunity to share the lives of some wonderful people.”
Ken’s philosophy for a successful career is characteristically humble in its simplicity. “You will be amazed at what you can accomplish if you don’t worry about who gets the credit.” And despite all his accomplishments, he still describes himself as an “average Joe” who just wanted to be a straight arrow like his father before him.
Through it all, Ken Jones found a way forward with his spirit and innate optimism unbowed. Now he has opened his heart to share very personal stories that are entertaining, a reflection of his resilient personality, and full of meaning for both Ken - and the readers fortunate enough to share his stories of a life well lived.
Books by Ken Jones
This is the story of two young men who built a company that over the years became a major player in the worldwide oil business. It grew from two small crew boats that provided transportation for oil workers in the shallow waters of coastal Louisiana to become the world's largest helicopter company, with over 500 aircraft and 3,000 employees in 25 countries.
Ken Jones was one of those two young men. The recent death of his partner prompted him to write this amusing and informed book, to share some of the stories of the company as it grew, and the many hard lessons learned along the way. It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don't worry about who gets the credit...or the blame!
It is 1942 when the Dunedin Star runs aground on the desolate Skeleton Coast of Southwest Africa while carrying supplies and ammunition to Egypt. Among the passengers is Alison Habib, a young Scottish woman traveling from England to Cairo with her Egyptian doctor husband and their eighteen-month-old daughter, Caroline. A convoy of South African Army trucks and twenty-eight men are sent across seven hundred miles of uncharted barren mountains and hot desert sands to rescue the survivors. Finally twenty-six days after the shipwreck, the exhausted passengers and stranded pilot arrive at the military outpost in Windhoek. But as sixty years pass, no one realizes that Alison is harboring a secret of what really happened on that beach. Through the pages of her diary and heartfelt letters, a poignant story of love, perseverance, and courage unfolds that reflects the commitment and values of another time
It was a day Ken Jones will never forget. As he and his wife, Joanne, sat in her oncologist’s office in 2007, they received shocking news: her breast cancer, thought to be in remission, had metastasized. Joanne had two years to live. As her courageous battle began, Joanne became part of an experimental drug trial helped along with chemotherapy. Always a passionate seeker of adventure, Joanne continued to travel the world, interrupted only by her treatments. In a touching recounting of Joanne’s last chapter of life Ken details why she elected to spend her final days on a South Pacific cruise, in search of the perfect black pearl necklace as a legacy to leave to her granddaughter. Through it all, Joanne touched the lives of many with ... her laughter, enthusiasm and spirit that lead to an amazing twist of fate no one expected. The Black Pearl Necklace shares the inspiring story of a husband’s experience traveling the world with his late wife before she succumbed to cancer.
