Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Snapshot of a legend

Tuesday, April 4, 2000 | 10:04 a.m.

Ken Jones was buried Monday.

His funeral, like his life, played to a house packed with the people who helped grow Las Vegas from its earliest days and who Kenny knew as friends. They represented both a who's who from those early days and a roomful of people who just needed to say goodbye.

I have known Ken Jones most of my life. His family has been part of ours ever since he came to work at the Sun close to 50 years ago. I was honored to be asked by the Jones family to say a few words at Kenny's funeral. To know Ken Jones was a highlight of most people's lives. Because so many people did not have that privilege, I am reprinting my remarks in the hopes that those who didn't know him might learn something about this remarkable man and those who did have that pleasure might relive some wonderful moments.

I have come to praise Ken Jones, not to bury him.

People like Kenny live on in the good memories of their families and friends long after they die. Kenny especially will be a fixture in all of our lives because he not only leaves a wonderful and loving family a very big one, I might add but a host of friends. Many thousands of people whose lives Kenny touched in a most dramatic way. He made them famous!

We all know about the kind and gentle soul who never had a bad or disparaging word to say about anybody. We also know the pixie-like quality of Kenny when he managed to get a person on camera and on paper for his famous Street Talk feature in the Sun.

I remember so many times when he'd come running back to the newspaper to develop some film to make sure that he had a face to go with the comment he had squeezed out of a Las Vegan or a tourist that he knew would be priceless. I say 'squeezed' but we all know that Ken Jones had no trouble allowing 40 years of people on the Las Vegas streets to seek and get their few minutes of fame in Street Talk.

And it was through this feature that Ken did his best work.

For sure, his visual coverage of Las Vegas during her first half-century of modern life will forever be the substance of our early pictorial history. Nobody did that better. In fact, this room is full of people who either read Street Talk regularly, were featured in it or were the subject of what he saw through his lens and what was published in the newspaper.

When Ken Jones gave regular citizens and tourists the chance to get their picture and their opinion in a daily newspaper, well, you thought he was handing them the world. And to many people that's exactly what he did. And he did it better than anyone else ever could.

My first real job at the Sun was working for Ken Jones. My father knew that I needed to start somewhere where I wouldn't hurt myself, and he knew that he could trust Ken with his young son's tutelage. In those days, there was a certain risk inherent in leaving an impressionable young person in the clutches of anyone who worked for a newspaper. It was even odds that I'd learn how to smoke, drink and curse long before I learned how to write or take a picture.

Not with Kenny, though. And my Dad knew it. He trusted Ken Jones and Ken returned that trust in kind.

With Kenny I got a first-class education in taking pictures, developing them, cropping them and arguing with the editors to make sure they ran properly in the newspaper. I had to learn to swear from the reporters.

I remember mostly trying to convince Kenny that at age 12 or so I was ready for my first homicide scene. He, of course, had other ideas. So it took me a few more years before I was allowed to go to a murder scene with camera in hand. It was Ken Jones who finally let me go.

It is memories like these and the knowledge of the thousands of good no, great deeds he did for so many people that makes it easier for his friends and family to say goodbye to Ken Jones and hello to a future filled with the kindest thoughts one person can have for another.

To his family, I know the pain of losing a wonderful and loving father and friend. I also know the joy and strength that comes from the memories, the sayings, the stories, the smiles and the pats on the back that are with me every day and that will be with each of you.

Right now Kenny is with his editor and publisher, Hank Greenspun. If my father was the crusading, risk-taking editor of the Sun, Kenny was the model of stability and congeniality to those of us at the paper and to the people in this town. They were a perfect match, and that is why they respected and admired each other like they did. That's why Las Vegas respected and admired them both, too. The rough-and-tumble days of early Las Vegas needed what both of them had to offer.

And like my father's thousands of columns, Las Vegas will have forever the thousands and thousands of pictures that Ken Jones took to chronicle a very unique and exciting time in the childhood of America's most fascinating town.

I'm honored that Ken's family gave me the privilege of saying these few words here today. I am honored and touched. Like each of you in this chapel, though, I am more honored and privileged to have known so well a man named Ken Jones. They don't make them like that anymore.

They can't.