On and off the job, Waring Jones combined his penchant for the written word with adventure.
Jones, playwright, theatrical producer, journalist and book collector, died Jan. 10 in St. Paul. He was 80.
The longtime Wayzata resident was a benefactor and producer at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis.
In the mid-1980s, when the center was in financial trouble, Jones came to the rescue.
Polly Carl, the producing artistic director of the center, said he told her that "he had paid off his mortgage" so he was able to take on another. "He was as interested in providing other people a sense of adventure as well as indulging his own."
He produced a half-dozen plays and musicals at the center. The theater at the center is named for him.
Before World War II, Jones attended Hopkins' Blake School, but graduated from high school in New York. During World War II, he served in the Army as a radio broadcaster in Hawaii.
After he graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in English, he followed family members into the newspaper business, buying the Hokah Chief, a newspaper in Hokah, Minn. His father, Carl Jones, was a publisher of the Minneapolis Journal. And Jones' grandfather, Herschel Jones, also owned Twin Cities newspapers. He ran the Hokah newspaper for several years in the early 1950s, often single-handedly.