Forgive my grief for one removed,

Thy creature, whom I found so fair.

I trust he lives in thee, and there

I find him worthier to be loved.

I never had the privilege of meeting Penn Jones, but I admired him for years. He was, to me, a hero in the truest sense --- based on the courage demonstrated in publishing the liberal Midlothian Mirror in the heart of Bircher country, where he took unpopular stands on everything from civil rights in the early 1960s, to the Kennedy assassination.

"The days after the assassination were tough," one of Penn's associates wrote me once. "Most of us felt grief, and anger, and a terrible feeling of helplessness. Not Penn. He felt the grief and the anger, but he translated those feelings into action..."

Indeed he did. "My actual investigating did not begin until I started reading the Warren Report," Jones told Mark Lane, in the film version of Rush to Judgment, "and realized that something was very, very much amiss."

His sense that something was amiss resulted in countless editorials, published first in his weekly newspaper, The Midlothian Mirror. These were later assembled in the four volumes of Forgive My Grief; he remained active after retirement with his newsletter, The Continuing Inquiry.

I wrote to Penn Jones a couple of times. The first time I somehow wrote the address down wrong, and it came back "Return To Sender." By the time I got around to writing again (to an address supplied by a guy at the old Assassination Information Center) several years had passed. I told him I wanted to buy his books. I got a gracious reply, plus three of the four volumes of Forgive My Grief (vol. 2 was long gone, he said), each one inscribed to me.

There was also an unexpected bonus: Penn was kind enough to send me a handful of The Continuing Inquiry, an 8mm copy of the Zapruder film, and a poster with evidence of suspicous activity in Dealey Plaza.

Later, I mailed him a story called "Critics and Anti-Critics," which I had pieced together from a bunch of quotes from various assassination books, including his. I never heard back from him on that, although soon after I had a dream in which he told me everything that was wrong with it.

I've collected a smattering of previously published comments and present them below. They paint a much better portrait of Penn Jones, Jr. than I could ever hope to. I conclude my comments with the words Penn once used about Roger Craig: Penn Jones, Jr. was a great American.

The first item is from the Introduction to Forgive My Grief, Volume II, by Maxwell Geismar.

Penn Jones Jr. differs from the other critics of the Warren Report in an interesting way. He doesn't have a professional legal background. He is not an academic scholar, nor even an intellectual in the conventional sense. He belongs to no scholarly organization or international tribunal. He is simply an old-fashioned country editor, in a now almost vanished tradition of personal integrity, independent thinking and concern for the truth --- in the deepest sense, concern for his country. And he had the good fortune to live and work in Midlothian, Texas.

He knows the terrain of the Assassination, the social environment of Dallas, the customs of that now notorious metropolis, the lore, the legends, the gossip of the town, the personalitites who were and who still are --- if they are still alive --- involved in the dark deed. He brings to the continuing, and by now conclusive, questioning of the Warren Report these unique qualifications --- and his conclusions are highly disquieting...

This item is by David Walsh, from Ramparts magazine's November 1966 issue.

On our trips to Dallas, Bill Turner, I, and editor Stan Sheinbaum interviewed many persons touched in some way by the killing of Kennedy. Some were willing to talk freely; most were guarded. Many said there was no conspiracy to assassinate the President, but almost invariably they would indicate that they thought otherwise: a playful smile, a wink, a sardonic turn around the corners of the mouth. Others treated the Warren Report with open contempt.

We interviewed lawyers, reporters, cops, laborers, janitors, simple housewives, an exotic dancer; most of them asked us not to use their names. From time to time we checked in at the Midlothian Mirror to compare notes with Penn Jones. Occasionally he would take us to his "farm" a few miles away, where he keeps his collection of barbed wire, and where he has installed a waterwheel to irrigate the hilltop ("the only working waterwheel in Ellis County," Jones boasts). Once we were sitting in that bucolic setting, discussing the gory details of this grisliest of murder cases, when all at once the incongruity struck us as enormously funny --- the barbed wire collection, Lyndon Johnson, the "Texas Mafia," the waterwheel, the mysterious deaths, the Grassy Knoll, the presumptuousness of our investigating a regicide --- and we threw our heads back, broken up with laughter. Penn, who has a formidable cackle, laughed the hardest. You have to laugh on this case, or you can begin to doubt your sanity.

This is excerpted from a Bill Turner review of The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report, by Richard Lewis and Lawrence Schiller. The authors defended the Warren Report and trashed the leading critics of the day; the book was the Case Closed of its era.

For Penn Jones, Jr., the gritty little editor of the Midlothian, Texas, Mirror who has ascribed a spate of mysterious deaths to the assassination, Lewis switches tactics. The impression he leaves of Jones is a guileless cotton-field rube who figured a couple of trips into nearby Dallas would provide enough demonology to pay for next year's planting. When they made their pilgrimage to Dallas, Lewis and Schiller took a side excursion to Midlothian to view Jones in his native habitat. They absorbed the local lore, hung around Browning's grocery to pick up the scuttlebutt on the town's most famous opportunist, and spotted Jones, "a pint of bourbon stuck in his hip pocket." At the "dusty Mirror offices," they discovered that Jones was selling a leather-bound author's edition of Forgive My Grief, an anthology of his original newspaper editorials, for $10. (Schiller and Lewis each bought a copy, and Lewis requested that his copy be numbered 313.)

In the comfort of his living room at home, they listened while he "proceeded to pour out equal amounts of bourbon and assassination theory."

The reader who goes along with this gag envisions a bucolic dipsomaniac, buck signs swimming in his head, conjuring up a wild, sinister fairy tale. Now there may be one or two newspapermen somewhere who don't touch the juice, but I've crooked elbows with Penn in San Francisco, New York and Midlothian, and I happen to know he doesn't drink enough for even 80-proof copy. He's one of that dwindling breed of country editor who simply puts two truths back to back and doesn't know how to be slick, a Texas populist who still sees some hope for this hate-filled land. Had Lewis and Schiller cared, they could have found out that Penn has one son in the Peace Corps, another a drum major at Michigan, had his Mirror office bombed in 1963 after he took on the local Birchers, and hopes to forestall foreclosure on that piece of Americana he calls home long enough to find out who did kill his President.

The following are the comments of John Judge, on the occasion of presenting Penn Jones with the Sylvia Meagher Lifetime Achievement Award in October of 1995.

Penn likes to relate a little joke about a loser in a fight who defends his shortcoming by claiming, "Yeah, but I made the other guy holler." Penn made them all holler --- from the local John Birch Society to the KKK, to the Dallas Police Department to the nation's media, and the government officials who crafted that lie called the Warren Commission investigation. And in the end, though he feels we've lost for now, he says, "They took the country, and they aren't about to give it back without a fight." And that's the fight he hopes to enlist us in...

This next item is one of my favorites. It's from Warren Hinckle's memoir, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade. Hinckle was, at the time he describes, the editor of Ramparts magazine.

The Midlothian Mirror was the genuine item, an indigenous, atavistic frontier weekly which covered the boredom of Midlothian like its dust. Its fighting editor, Penn Jones, Jr., was of a dying breed of populist prairie journalists, an editor who was part Front Page, part Grapes of Wrath. He had received Southern Illinois University's Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism for beating up a Bircher on his composing room floor. His newspaper appeared to be the only functioning anti-Establishment voice in the shadow of Dallas. Penn's wife ran the linotype, and he did everything else --- from writing the editorials to boarding up the front window after receiving a letter to the editor in the form of a firebomb. Penn looked like a wash-and-wear version of Burgess Meredith. He was five foot five, his weathered face had an unfinished texture, as if sandblasted out of balsa wood, and his uneven, receding hairline was semi-crew cut in a style scalped by amateur Indians.

John Griffin had called him "scrappy," and God perhaps had Penn Jones in mind when he created the word. When the city paved the streets in the black section of Midlothian with a gravel loaded with rusty nails, Penn not only wrote about it --- he dug some 50 pounds of nails out of the streets and put them on display in his office window for all the world to see. When a lieutenant from the Dallas police department offered Penn the lucrative job of printing the regional KKK newspaper, Penn told him to go to hell. "Half the cops in Dallas belong to the KKK or the Birch society," he said. Penn pledged allegiance to no creed but the truth, which (his corny country parlance gave a dignity to the cliché) he called the "cross and grail" of the newspaperman. He was a card-carrying member of Genuine America and proud of it: he had landed at Salerno with the fighting Texas 36th Infantry in World War II; his collection of barbed wire was the largest, he said modestly, in the continental United States; his pudgy son was the drum major for the University of Michigan marching band. He was especially proud of the esteem in which he was held by his fellow country editors in the Southwest and Midwest, who viewed him as something of a cross between William Allen White and the Green Hornet. When the Frederick, Colorado, Farmer and Miner called Penn Jones "the most courageous newspaperman of our time" for his editorials on the assassination in Dallas, that meant more to Penn than the day Walter Cronkite came to take his picture.

The following is from Roger Craig's autobiography, When They Kill A President. He writes about a period immediately after threats had been made on his life.

At approximately 11 p.m. someone knocked on the door and I opened it with my left hand, holding my 45 automatic in my right hand. Standing there was a small but well-built man in his late forties or early fifties. He said, "My name is Penn Jones. Jim Garrison called me." My hand tightened on the 45 when my wife, Molly, took hold of me and said, "I've seen him on T.V. He is Penn Jones." With that I relaxed and he remained Penn Jones!

Penn Jones listened to my story and then began making telephone calls to newsmen and wire services that he had contact with, explaining to me that the best protection for me was open coverage on the incident. After a long talk with Penn Jones I found that I had a great deal of respect and admiration for this man. Although small in stature, I felt he would fight the devil himself to find the truth about the assassination.

We conclude here with comments that were used as the Introduction of Forgive My Grief Vol. IV.

From Editor Rick Friedmn's column in The Star-Tribune of Tinley Park, Ill., October 10, 1974.

Penn, I picked up my copy of the Midlothian (Tex.) Mirror this week an era ended for me.

It ended with a simple front-page announcement:

"Thanks, Midlothian. This is the last issue of the Midlothian Mirror with Penn Jones Jr. as editor. Mr. and Mrs. Barham Alderdice are the new owners and operators. We urge our readers and advertisers to be as loyal to them as you have been to us. We are very grateful for our 29 years (less two months) at the head of this weekly. We haven't accomplished much, but we sure had our time at bat." YOU SURE DID, Penn. And you played one hell of a ball game.

It was a ball game I began watching back in July 1963, when you and I first got together at the International Conference of Weekly Newspaper Editors. Up to that point, you had never heard of ICWNE and most of us at the conference had never heard of you.

ICWNE gave you its Elijah Parish Lovejoy award for courage in journalism. We were to continue hearing of you from then on --- on radio and television and in national magazines, including the 21-page cover story about you in "Ramparts."

YOU WON THE Lovejoy award for a battle you had waged with the John Birch society which included two physical assaults on you and the firebombing of your newspaper plant.

In one of those fights, you flew through a plate glass door with the leader of the local John Birch society. He weighed 190 pounds and stood 6-2. You weighed 130 punds and stood 5-2. You were sitting on him, choking him, when they pulled you off.

He went to the hospital because you bit him on the hand.

I REMEMBER what you said back there in 1963 on receiving the Courage in Journalism award:

"Sometimes the little publishers need encouragement because it gets pretty lonely down there. I had been fighting 17 years and was about ready to give up. I couldn't even help elect a man to the school board. But maybe that award makes me think I'll stick around another 17 years."

You stuck around for another 11 years, Penn. I'll settle for that. It's been one hell of an 11 years, and you've touched a lot of lives deeply, including mine and my family's.

I REMEMBER what you told me 11 years ago at the conference: how you had joined the Army in 1940 as a technical sergeant and had come home five years later as a major with a Bronze star.

You came home from Italy with something far more important. You explained it this way:

"I felt that from what I had seen of the world --- of war and misery --- if my friends had not died in vain then somebody had a terrific job to do of explaining the task in front of us, to insure any type of peace. I had decided to run a newspaper so that I could make at least one community realize the duties that went along with their rights as citizens of the greatest democracy on earth."

It was 1945 when you bought the Midlothian Mirror, a broken-down, two-year-old newspaper, for $4,000.

ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, your territory expanded. You stepped from one dusty little community outside of Dallas into the world.

You were sitting in the Dallas Trade Mart at noon that day, waiting for the President of the United States to arrive for a luncheon. While you waited, the President was assassinated a few miles away.

You dedicated the rest of your newspaper career to finding out who really killed John F. Kennedy.

YOU NEVER believed that Oswald did it. You never believed the Warren Commission report.

You travelled at your own expense from one end of the country to the other, tracking down leads. You wrote three books and published them, again, at your own expense and went broke in the process.

You were called a fool and a nut and even a drunk (you could belt down straight Bourbon better than anyone I ever knew and not even show it) by those who disagreed with you.

You popped up on television and radio shows, on college campuses, all over, trying to make one very large community, the United States of America, "realize the duties that went along witn their rights as citizens of the greatest democracy on earth."

AND THROUGH it all, you never lost your sense of humor (I never knew anyone who could laugh as hard at his own jokes) or your humility. You never saw yourself as a superstar of the anti-establishment.

In fact, you were the most unlikely superstar imaginable: a bald man in his fifties with a wrinkled face and a warmth that made most people like you immediately.

You never had to shout to make a point. You talked and people listened, at least some people did.

But there was always that East Texas toughness behind your eyes.

I won't go into your theories on the Kennedy assassination. If people want to know about them, they can order your three Forgive My Grief books. You have thousands of unsold copies left.

SOMETIME DURING those "assassination investigation" years, I asked you what you were trying to accomplish. You said, "If somewhere up the line, years from now, some historian looks at even a little bit of what I've put down in print and makes use of it to get the truth, everything I've done was worth it."

It was worth it, Penn.

Your lonely pursuit of the truth has set the standard for those of us who chase it for a living.

You've more than lived up to the promise you made to those friends of yours who died in the hills of Italy some 30 years ago.

I love you, Penn. Because you represent the best of what gives "this greatest democracy on earth" a chance to work.

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