Louisville Magazine

MAR 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/111400

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 62 of 136

The founder of Humana traces his success back to the West End, in particular the old Parkland Library, which introduced him to books ��� and possibility. By Cary Stemle Photo by Gail Kamenish Going Home with L ong before he co-founded what would grow into a Fortune 500 company, David Jones knocked some guys out. Tree to be exact. He volunteers this information while steering his Camry hybrid through the Spalding University campus on South Tird Street, then adds, matter-of-factly: ���I had real big hands.��� Jones, the 83-year-old founder of Humana, has agreed to give us a guided tour of the West End neighborhoods where he grew up, and after a leisurely car ride through California and Parkland, where he and his fve siblings roamed, he wants to talk about one more site. He points to the stately building that is now the Spalding University Center and recalls that, back in the day, it was the old Columbia Auditorium, which played host to Golden Gloves boxing matches. Jones and big brother Logan, his senior by only 15 months and the better boxer by all accounts, fought there under the tutelage of one Joe Martin, the former Louisville cop who���s slightly better known for his later work with Muhammad Ali. Cars were rare then, and the Jones boys thought nothing of walking to the Columbia, or to the YMCA at the corner of Tird and Broadway. Tree days a week, they made that mile-and-a-half trek from their home at 1737 Garland Ave. Tirty minutes before, Jones had shown me that address, where the family lived from 1938���52. (Later the Joneses lived at 2234 Garland, from which they were displaced by the 1937 food.) Te 1700 block is mostly full, but his childhood home is missing. For comparison, Jones notes that the houses at 1730 and 1719 are camelbacks (shotgun houses with three rooms down and two rooms upstairs in the rear) and nearly identical to the one in which he grew up. 56 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 David Jones We idle at the corner of 18th and Garland while he explains that slanting 18th (aka Dixie Highway) was a major thoroughfare then and the most direct route from downtown Louisville to Elizabethtown and on to Nashville. He gestures toward various structures and talks. ���Tere was a little store where we bought kerosene when our heat got turned of,��� he says. He mentions the old California Elementary (apartments now) where he attended frst grade, and Turner���s Grill, where burgers were 15 cents or 25 with cheese. Te site of today���s Shorty���s Food Mart was Dawn Bakery, selling ���delicious pastries, which every now and then we could aford.��� Another site on the west side of 18th once belonged to Old Man Weller, who spoke his native German and ran a grocery and a tab for everyone, which was invaluable in those austere days of the Great Depression. Te Brooks Brothers department store, which is not, Jones points out dryly, the famous one, sold what seemed like the best shoes in the world. Te point, he says as we head south on Dixie ��� past the church where the family worshipped, the old Kaplan���s Drug Store at the corner of St. Catherine, and the corner home where the Jones family doctor lived and worked ��� is that the neighborhood had ���all the shops that you needed to live.��� T he West End neighborhoods of Jones��� youth were segregated ��� primarily white west of 15th Street, he said, and largely African-American east. Te Jones family believed in equality, he says, and the N-word was never spoken in their home. He routinely walked through other west Louisville neighborhoods, always without incident, and his boxing training with Martin took place at the old Negro YMCA at Chestnut and Ninth, where white kids were welcome. Te downtown Y, of course, ofered no such reciprocity. ���At the time, I knew that was unfair,��� Jones says. His mother, Elsie Florence Turman Jones, one of eight children in an Irish family, had trained as a teacher but couldn���t teach because public schools limited jobs to men and single women. She lived by the Golden Rule and looked after neighbors who needed help, he says, and worked at the Spalding laundry from 11 p.m. until everything was washed. ���But she was always home and up and ready to get six kids of to school,��� Jones recalls. His father, Evan Logan Jones, from a family of Welsh origin, was laid of from his shipping clerk���s job at General Box Co. in 1938 and was out of work until the United States entered World War II in 1941, when he got on at Jefboat. Te Jefersonville, Ind., shipyard makes barges today, but at that time it became part of the nation���s so-called ���arsenal of democracy,��� and his dad helped crank out LSTs (amphibious landing craft), which were workhorses during the war. ���It���s hard to believe we built 100 major ships here in Jef,��� David Jones says, ���but we did. Tat���s something to be proud of.��� We head west on Dumesnil Street and then south to Wilson Avenue driving past the old Parkland Junior High School, a ���lovely old building��� near 25th Street where Jones attended grades 7-9; it���s now the Lyman T. Johnson Traditional Middle School. Jones was his junior high���s valedictorian, and he talked his parents into letting him drive the family���s old Model A to graduation. ���I drove around honking the horn, making sure everybody saw me,��� he says. We circle back east to Cypress Street, where

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Louisville Magazine - MAR 2013