This article about Gene appeared in the Tucson Weekly's annual "Local Heroes" issue, December 21, 2006.

Gene Jones

Gene Jones turns 91 in April, but he's not slowing down. If anything, he's picking up speed.

He's always tended to be out in front. Jones wanted to be a pilot in World War II, and although it required that he have surgery on both eyes before he could get into flight school, he made it, graduating four days after Pearl Harbor. Two weeks later, as a green second lieutenant, he was selected for an experimental training program that had been set up to produce desperately needed four-engine pilots as quickly as possible. After a month, he was a B-24 bomber pilot, and in 1942, he piloted one of the first B-24s sent from Hawaii into the South Pacific.

He rose to squadron commander and beyond, dropped many bombs and once escorted Eleanor Roosevelt on a super-secret morale-raising visit to hospitalized soldiers on Guadalcanal. He ended the war as a lieutenant colonel who couldn't wait to get out of the service, go into business and start doing things his own way.

Which he did, buying failing businesses, turning them around, disposing of them, then looking for the next opportunity. He didn't care what the business was: "It didn't matter. I'd majored in English at Dartmouth, so I wasn't actually qualified to do anything."

A serial success, Jones first owned a millwork factory, then a company that made printed circuits, one that made chainsaws, and another that made machinery for manufacturing plastics, plus two other businesses before he retired, a rich man, to Tucson in 1978.

Retirement lasted less than a year.

"I'd finished up all the projects I could find to do around the house. And Ruth, my wife, likes to say that she married me for life, but not for lunch. I had to find something to do with myself."

Soon, he was into real estate, offhandedly making another fortune with the Copper Crest development west of town. And he and Ruth also continued their longtime support of classical music by becoming involved with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Arizona Opera and the UA's School of Music.

Since 2000, Jones' tsunami-like energy and drive--not to mention roughly $1 million of his money--have mostly been devoted, yet again, to something entirely different. Working with longtime Tucson music educator Carroll Rinehart and key personnel at Tucson Unified School District--notably Joan Ashcraft, TUSD's director of fine and performing arts--Jones started and has largely financed an innovative arts-education program, Opening Minds Through the Arts, that currently reaches 17,000 Tucson children, makes life easier for 650 teachers and helps support 85 local artists.

"It's a way to give back," he says. "I'm not a musician, and I'm not a teacher. But the more I learned about research on learning and music, the more I needed to make this happen."

It started by chance.

"I just happened to have been elected president of the Tucson Symphony board, and happened to be at a conference for people who ran orchestras, and there, I happened to walk into a room where Peter Perret was giving a presentation about the effects of putting a symphony quintet in elementary classrooms in Winston-Salem, N.C. Completely by chance, I turned in at that door and not another. I came out on fire. I knew somehow, we had to do this in Tucson, but we had to do it better, for more weeks of the school year, in more grades, in every school.

"Music has an incredible effect on the brain, on learning. We don't know much about how it works, but we know it does. So many children come to school without any English at all, and you get those children in kindergarten or first grade, have them singing songs, playing instruments, seeing the words up on the board, and their little minds just open to the language, and they're ready to learn. So, of course, their test scores go up."

OMA has developed and expanded with astounding speed, given the usual pace of institutional change. Jones' major focus now is getting the program securely funded and widely implemented. There are signs that the time is close: Research--underwritten by Jones--has consistently shown that kids in the OMA program have better test scores than children in similar schools that don't have the program.

If a budget override comes up for a vote next spring and passes, part of the money will be used to support and expand OMA. Jones is also working to convince researchers at the UA's College of Medicine that program students are the perfect pool of research subjects for studying the physical effects of music on the developing brain--a very hot topic in neurology. And in a development that pleases Jones to no end, this summer, OMA was invited to participate in a study on excellence in arts education by Harvard's Project Zero, the country's pre-eminent center for research on arts education. The project sent a team to Tucson in September on a preliminary visit.

"The project's director, Steve Seidel, told me as he was leaving that OMA had better be ready to grow, because in a few years, this will be the standard by which all other programs will be judged, and it'll be the model for the entire country."

Not a bad outcome for a project started by a guy in his 80s.

For more about Jones' World War II experiences--and those of other Tucson veterans--go to ww2stories.org. For more about OMA, go to www.omaprogramAZ.org.

Editor’s Note: The following story was excerpted with permission from a story in Accent of the Arizona Daily Star, published on July 20, 2007.

He’s made a difference for our kids!

Eugene Jones has more than 17,000 reasons to believe that he has made a difference in Tucson.

When he was 84 years old, Jones founded Opening Minds Through the Arts, a program within the Tucson Unified School District that uses music, dance and other creative forms to stimulate academic learning in children.

Opening Minds reaches more than 17,000 students a year and includes involvement from more than 50 professional local musicians, dancers and artists.

“This is the most satisfying thing I’ve done in my life by far,” Jones said “I’ve had the opportunity to help affect so many kids’ lives, to make such a difference in their outlook and their chances.”

Jones has always been a staunch supporter of the arts, particularly music. Jones has been involved with organizations such as the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Arizona Opera since moving to the Old Pueblo in 1978. He came up with the concept for Opening Minds after attending an American Symphony Orchestra League-sponsored seminar that included a workshop on student learning through the arts.

“I came out of that room on fire,” Jones said. “I thought that if this is what music can do, we damn well better do it. We would be derelict not to.”

Jones contacted the Tucson Unified School District and, with the help of people like TUSD Fine and Performing Arts Director Joan Ashcraft, got the ball rolling. He kicked this [the OMA Program] off with a $50,000 contribution [to TUSD].

Under guidelines set out by Jones and his colleagues, the district formed ties to major players in the arts community, recruiting members from the Tucson Symphony, Arizona Opera and the University of Arizona’s music and dance schools – a practice that they continue to this day.

By all accounts, the program appears to have yielded results. Studies conducted by the independent educational research firm WestEd have shown improved Stanford 9 test scores in reading, language and mathematics for students attending Opening Minds Through the Arts schools. Those kind of numbers have garnered national attention.

Jones himself – who said he has ponied up more than $1 million of his own money for Opening Minds Through the Arts – is currently in the running for the Purpose Prize for his philanthropy, a $100,000 award given to five Americans over the age of 60. [Jones was awarded the $100,000 Purpose Prize in September, 2007.] Jones said every cent of that money will be put into the program. He hopes to have Opening Minds Through the Arts running in every elementary school in the district within the next few years and eventually in all of the districts throughout the Tucson area.  

“In this fast-moving world, you’ve got to have a good education,” Jones said. “It is gratifying to see that happening in Tucson.”

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