The Way We Were: Joyce Thomas Jones — Part II

The Way We Were: Joyce Thomas Jones — Part II

By Laura Jane Pittman

 

Last month, retired UNF educator Joyce Thomas Jones shared her earliest memories of growing up in the city of South Jacksonville in last month’s column. This month, we follow Jones through her elementary and high school years, in a charming glimpse of the way things were.

Joyce Thomas Jones was a very good little girl. She kept busy in the afternoons by taking piano from a lady in a two story house near her own and dance lessons from a studio where Reddi Arts is located today.

The youngest of two girls by eight and a half years, she nearly always did what her Momma told her. But there was one exception.

“When I was about four or five, Momma would give my sister and me money to take the bus to downtown with our boy cousins. Well, the older kids figured out they could walk across the Main Street Bridge instead of riding the bus and use the bus fare to buy things at Woolworth’s,” she recalled with a chuckle. “So, of course, I had to go along with them. I remember being terrified when we had to walk over the grating on the bridge.”

Jones’ family moved to a house on Nira Street (near where the Ronald McDonald House is today) when she was about five years old. Her father and mother both worked, which was difficult in those days because there was no day care available outside the home. The family’s maid Rebecca came every day to pick Jones up from her first grade classroom, an unusual circumstance, she remembers, because the other children were picked up by their mothers.

After a few years at Service Drugs, Jones’ mother had taken a job at Lakewood Pharmacy, and she subsequently managed the store for 19 years. Jones would often hang out there after school, and she was sometimes put in charge of discreetly watching the “bigger boys” to make sure they weren’t poking holes in things or messing with the comics.

Lakewood was “Jacksonville’s Most Beautiful Pharmacy,” according to the postcards the store sold. And it had everything, including a lunch counter and a lending library. Jones remembers helping her mother price jewelry for the store by writing on little string tags– “Figure out the price and mark it up 250 percent,” her mother taught her.

The Thomas family had one of the first TV sets of any of the families on Nira Street, so the neighborhood kids would come over to watch it. Although she hated to see the radio go (her father turned it into a bar), Jones loved watching “Tom Corbett-Space Cadet” and “Hopalong Cassidy.” Her sister Jean would bring her Methodist youth group over on Wednesday nights to make popcorn and watch TV.

By the time Jones was six years old, she would walk down the street to Clark’s Supermarket by herself to buy items for dinner.

“My sister often cooked for us because my mom wasn’t home from work yet, and she had three dishes she could make. I would take $1 and buy a half pound of ground beef, spaghetti, and sauce – and I would still have change left over,” recalled Jones. “We would sometimes walk down to Keith’s Sundaes, where European Street is now, and get ice cream sandwiches for dessert.“

The Thomas girls and their cousins entertained themselves by playing on the family’s big front porch. Games included hospital (sister Jean was the nurse who operated on dolls with needle and thread, and Jones was the orderly putting the patient in bed), flying to Mars on the porch swing, and pirates with hats made of newspaper. The kids would also watch the golfers across the river at the driving range that was located where Baptist Hospital is today, and they would watch the bottles travel the conveyor belt at the Pepsi bottling plant.

Jones attended Landon High School, where she was a majorette. In the summers, she would clean the house each morning, take her mother to work, and then have the rest of the day free to hang out with her majorette friends.

“I got my license the day I turned 16, and I’ve lived in my car ever since,” she laughed. “We would drive farther than we wanted our parents to know, and one of my friends told me that if you back up the car, the mileage didn’t register. I found out that doesn’t work!”

The kids at Landon in those days entertained themselves with sock hops in each other’s garages. They would spin the 45rpm records that they bought for 49 cents each at Abe Livert Record Store in San Marco [located where Subway is now].

Today, Jones lives on Northwood Road, and she still teaches an occasional class at UNF. She attended her 50th Landon High School reunion last summer, and she loved reconnecting with old friends.

“We had so much fun in those days, and we all knew each other so well because most of us had started in first grade together at Southside Grammar School,” smiled Jones. “I have great memories of childhood and of growing up in Jacksonville.”

 

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