There's only one Milton Jones: 100-year-old WIVK veteran is celebrated on his birthday
Hayley Harper of Morgan Hayley Photography on North Broadway says she started her “baby business” Knox Exchange when the space next to her studio became available.
Originally the 1929 Lane Pharmacy & Coca-Cola Soda Fountain, it’s a perfect event space, and Harper has rented it out for all kinds of parties and gatherings. But until Milton Jones walked in the door, she’d never hosted a 100th birthday party.
Held on March 22, Jones’ actual birthday, the party attracted a lively crowd from near and far, including the WIVK Frog and many associated with the radio station where he spent decades as its chief engineer.
Jones grew up in the Bluegrass Road area of Farragut and in Maryville, the third of six children. The kids went to Blue Grass Elementary School, and Jones developed an early interest in technology.
“I guess I was about 8 or 9 years old when my father bought a radio and I looked in the back of that radio to see what it was about. I noticed little bulbs burning and I was curious. We had an antenna strung outside; I couldn’t figure out how that wire picked up the ‘Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round’ live on WNOX in Knoxville and we were in Maryville. I was always curious about things and that’s what got me into radio, I guess.”
At Farragut High School, Jones says, “I tried to build a radio in arts and crafts. It didn’t work and I never did finish it. There weren’t a lot of technical parts available — not like it is nowadays.”
After graduating in 1941, he obtained a first class radio license at Nashville’s Madison College and went to work in Lexington, Kentucky, training Army Signal Corps. Then he was called back to Tennessee to help with the Manhattan Project.
“It was an operation that you cannot conceive. If they needed something, they got it. They wanted that bomb, they wanted it soon, they wanted it fast. Everything about it was the world’s largest — it was unbelievable. I didn’t have any idea it was going to be that big.”
After a brief stint in the Navy, Jones returned to Oak Ridge, but with the war over, “the village was all empty. That’s when I got into radio.”
He started at WIVK in 1953 as chief engineer, ultimately traveling all over the South to set up new stations as Jim Dick, the station’s founder who died in 2011, bought them up. “I worked for him for 40 years and I never had a cross word with that man. None whatsoever. A very good man.”
Even after Jones retired in 1993, he continued as a consultant. “I would go around to different stations and tune their towers. It’s very complicated, very specialized. It takes special equipment. I did that for years and I enjoyed it very much.”
He raised a family of two boys and two girls with Anna Ruth Akins, whom he married in 1953. At age 91, she was by his side at the party.
Milton says his mother, born in 1898, died at the age of 112 having lived in three centuries, so his longevity isn’t that much of a surprise. Still, he’s astonished by some of the details of his long life. “I never thought I’d live to see my first child retire at 60 years old!”