Don Jones Found Peace

From The Columbus Dispatch:

It didn’t take death for Don Jones to find peace.

It followed him for 91 years.

For Jones, peace often came through art, and through art Jones found his calling, touching thousands of lives as one of the pioneers of art therapy.

Jones, of Worthington, died at Kobacker House on Jan. 28. A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. today at the first Unitarian Universalist Church in Clintonville.

The bullet points of his life would by themselves tell the tale of a life well-lived: an artist, a therapist, a minister, a professor. He worked alongside noted psychiatrist Karl Menninger at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan., for 16 years. While there, he became an ordained Methodist minister and pastor of a church in Rossville, Kan. There, he also joined forces with the NAACP during in the Brown v. Board of Education trials of the early 1950s. His illustration, “The Equality Kids,” became a poster used by supporters of desegregation.

“He was a radical liberal at a time when it wasn’t so easy to be that,” said longtime co-worker Bruce Moon.

Jones moved to Worthington in 1967 and started the adjunctive therapy program at Harding Hospital, where he worked for 20 years. He founded the Worthington Area Arts League in his basement. He taught art therapy at Capital University and the Columbus College of Art & Design, and ministered two central Ohio Unitarian congregations.

“He called himself a secular mystic,” said his widow, Karen Rush Jones.

It’s a life’s work, however, that happened almost by accident, ignited by the flame of peace.

Jones was drafted when the United States entered World War II. A pacifist, he became a conscientious objector and served four years in the Civilian Public Service with a group of Mennonites assigned to be aides at Marlboro State Hospital in New Jersey.

Because most able men were drafted into the military, there was a severe staffing shortage.

“He went to Marlboro as a 19-year-old,” Mrs. Jones said. “When he got there, the aides handed him the keys and said, ‘See you.’ He oversaw three wards of 150 people each, working 12 hours a day serving the severely mentally ill with no psychotropic drugs.”

He turned to art as a way of coping with the misery that surrounded him, and noticed that not only did patients respond to it, but some who hadn’t communicated verbally in years were creating their own art, with whatever materials they could find — usually blood or feces.

“He called it soul language,” said Mrs. Jones.

“His art and their art were based in the same desire, to express,” Moon said. “It was a dramatic acknowledgement that talking isn’t enough. Art was therapy.

“There’s no way to estimate the countless number of people he helped and influenced, from the thousands of patients to the hundreds of students and colleagues, and that doesn’t even begin to count friends and family,” Moon said.

“Boy, the world was a better place because he was in it, and will continue to be for years to come.”