Just about everyone in Wiscasset knows George Jones as a successful businessman. Few know of his humble roots.

Two days after his birth in a Massachusetts hospital, his mother died from complications with childbirth. His father, Allan Jones, was unable to take care of his son; so, for the first five years of his life, George Jones was raised by a great-aunt and great uncle.

It was not an easy time, Jones said. “I apparently got too much for her to handle,” he said.

After living with his relatives, his father sent him to live with a Damariscotta teacher, Florence Erskine, who was raising several of her grandchildren. “She treated me like one of her own children,” Jones said.

Jones returned to live with his father when he was in fifth grade, after his father remarried. But he returned to Damariscotta to complete his last three years of high school and graduated from Lincoln Academy   in 1941.

After high school, he attended the University of Maine for about a year and a half, then left and worked on the clean-up crew at Bath Iron Works. Then he enlisted in the Army Air Force.

Military service

Jones said he had hopes of being a pilot, but poor eyesight kept him  fromthat path. Instead, he was sent to Shepherd Field in Texas for basic training, Sioux Falls, S.D., for radio school, and Yuma, Ariz., for gunnery school. After that, he went to Columbia, S.C., for crew training on the famed B-25 Mitchell bomber.

Jones was assigned to the 70th Bombardment Squadron and shipped to the Pacific in a B-25 with modified fueltanks. “We were called a flying gas tank,” Jones said. He logged 279 combat hours while in the Philippines (from October 21, 1944 through April 25, 1945).

Most of those missions were flown very close to the tree tops. “During these low flying missions we were always under fire,” he said. During his longest mission, Jones said the plane’s navigator received a head wound and died.

After his tour, he came home on a 30-day leave with orders to return to the Pacific afterward. In fact, he said he had his orders in his pocket when he learned the Japanese had surrendered.

Life after the military

After the war, Jones came home and went to work at Bath Iron Works – but not for long.

He met Marilyn Petrie at a dance at the Red Men’s Hall in Wiscasset, and a year later they were married. In 1950, he bought a home on Pleasant Street with a GI loan. He still calls it home.

The couple were married 66 years before Marilyn Jones' death this past year. They had three children, Donald, Dale and Dawn.

With a $5,000 loan from his father, Allan Jones, who had worked at Bath Iron Works during the war, he started the Yankee Wholesale business.

For nearly 30 years, Jones and his wife owned and operated the business, supplying candy and tobacco to independent stores along the Maine coast. His late wife was vice president and treasurer of the business.

On 1979, they sold the business to Pine State Trading Co., but Jones continued to work as a buyer for the company about 15 years.

Although Jones celebrated his 89th birthday, January 24, he still remembers his military life as if it all happened yesterday.

Charlotte Boynton can be reached at 207-844-4632 or cboynton@wiscassetnewspaper.com.