Interview with Johnnie Jones Sr

Selected quotes and notes from Count Time Podcast with LD Azobra Interview of Living Legend Johnnie A. Jones, Sr.

We have one of the true Living legends the honorable doctor, attorney Johnny Jones, Sr. This young man here is 101 years old. He was born in 1919.

Johnnie A Jones, Sr
Yeah, 1919. I’ll be 102. November the 30th.

LD Azobra
How do one live to be 100?

Johnnie A Jones, Sr
How did I live to get to be a hundred?

LD Azobra
Hundred and one?

Johnnie A Jones, Sr
I don’t drink and I don’t smoke. I got drunk at eleven somewhere around ten or eleven. I went into my, we have a lot of wine and stuff I put in my house and I got drunk.I went in the pantry the cellar would went to the pantry that’s what they called it then, went into wine. When I left out, I was sick as a dog. I got so drunk and I haven’t drank since!

When they drafted me out of Southern University I went and reported just like everybody else. When I got to my Draft Board they said we gone send you to Camp Cleveland. I said not today.

You see, I say, but I’m going. But I’m going to finish this semester just like LSU students. And that’s it. When I came back, everybody say, oh, he rejected. He was rejected. Mama, my dad was so scared he didn’t know what to do. Dad say, boy they going to kill him?

So.

No, I say, I let me tell you, when I finish this semester, I will go. You won’t have to come for me. I say I’ll come down here and tell you I’m ready to go. And if then you don’t take me and Southern University have a 15 days open for you to go and matriculate. Matriculate means to register to go to College. And that word is matriculate.

And I say, you got 15 days. now. Within these 15 days after that semester, I’m going to stay out. On the 15th day, I’m going to enroll again.
This the Draft Board I’m telling that.

And I say, when that happens, you’re going to have to go through the same thing again because I’m not going to be a Sophisticated Jeff. Just let you push me around. 

I’m going to go out there and fight for freedom and then come back here and you can’t sit down on the bus.

Everything I’ve done I’d do it all over again. And if I could and right now I would do as much as I can. That which you can do for yourself, you don’t need for someone else to do it, go on and get it done. Well I love this country, I love this nation, I love everybody. I don’t blame anybody for us not doing some earlier, but us.