Bob Jones, a hard-charging newspaper and television journalist who was a familiar face in TV news for over two decades in Hawaii, died at his Diamond Head home Monday.
The cause of death was heart failure, according to his wife, Denby Fawcett. He was 85.
“He will be missed. He was definitely one of a kind,” said Jim Manke, former assignment editor and news director at KGMB, where Jones was a top reporter and news anchor.
In recent years Jones was probably best known for his highly opinionated weekly columns at MidWeek and later his internet blog, which he steadfastly worked on until the day he died.
“His body was giving out, but his mind was very strong,” Fawcett said Wednesday.
Jones, originally from Ohio, began his journalism career as a police reporter for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Then, after serving a three-year European tour in the Air Force, he worked at newspapers in Europe before landing back in the states at the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal.
Jones moved to Hawaii in 1963 to work for The Honolulu Advertiser, first as a general assignment reporter and then as its military editor.
He would make his mark reporting on the Vietnam War. He accompanied the Kaneohe 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines when they went into Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1964. A year later he was embedded with the 25th Infantry Division, which had units in Cu Chi and Pleiku.
On his return to Hawaii, Jones was hired by KGMB and was later nabbed as a correspondent in Vietnam and Laos by NBC News.
When he came back to Honolulu, Jones anchored the news at KGMB until 1994. Along the way, he helped create some significant news shows and documentaries and won several Emmy awards and a Peabody Award.
“He was the consummate journalist,” former KGMB colleague Chuck Parker said. “He was always looking for a story. It didn’t matter what it was or where it was. And he was a skilled writer. He could take mundane copy and make it sing.”
Former KGMB reporter Leslie Wilcox described Jones as Hawaii’s top journalist in the golden age of television.
“Those were the days before cable and internet, and Channel 9 had a huge audience,” she said. “It was a pleasure seeing him in action.”
There was a time in the 1970s when Jones might have been best known for his end-of-show antics with co-anchor Tim Tindall and sports anchor Joe Moore.
“They could get pretty outrageous,” Manke recalled. “One night they jumped a motorcycle over the news desk.”
Manke said Jones, as a reporter, had an incredible knack for seeing the meat of a subject and being able to quickly turn it around into a understandable short-form story perfect for television.
“He could turn a story on a dime,” added Parker. “He could come in at 10 (minutes) to 5 (p.m.) and turn the lead story. He knew what it was in his head. He never missed a time slot.”
Former KGMB reporter Bambi Weil said Jones helped her and other green reporters at KGMB improve their craft.
“The guy was wonderful, and always encouraging” said Weil, who went on to become a Circuit Court judge. “He was a truth-teller and a shining light. It is his legacy at a time when the network television news is often criticized for lack of integrity.”
Dan Boylan, a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii West-Oahu, helped anchor election nights with Jones for more than a decade on KGMB, developing a friendship along the way.
Boylan said Jones’ knowledge about the Vietnam War was important to Hawaii.
“Vietnam was with us constantly. So having a guy like Bob talking about the war … added significantly to his work as a journalist,” Boylan said.
“Hawaii was very much influenced by the people and the soldiers and sailors who were going to war, and Bob had that kind of credibility. Bob grew up with the military. The war in Vietnam was our generation’s war. He covered it. Bob had been there. He commented on things that happened that day, and that is a part of Hawaii we tend to overlook. Vietnam affected Hawaii greatly,” he said.
Jones helped KGMB land Boylan for election-night political analysis.
“On election nights we had a heck of a good time and I think we were better than the other channels. He was truly a pro. A good writer, he knew the territory. He was of the best of the lot as a news anchor. Bob was strong enough and capable enough he could handle news all by himself,” he said.
“We worked together very, very well. After the polls closed on election nights Bob and I would always have a beer or two or three or four, and he was a fun guy. We would be at the Columbia Inn and people would always come up to Bob. He was good to people.”
In addition to his wife, Jones is survived by daughter Brett Jones, son-in-law Michael Goldman, grandson Miles Alexander Goldman- Jones, and brothers Ken and Tom Jones.
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Star-Advertiser staff writer Peter Boylan contributed to this report.
