SEQUIM — Clint Jones is known for circulating and agitating about town, calling for the abolition of many an institution: the spelling of Sequim, the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and now the Electoral College, the presidential-election system he sees as plain ridiculous.
A prolific writer of petitions and letters to the editor, Jones, 82, has called for changing Sequim to Squim.
He believes Americans should pledge their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution instead of to that piece of cloth.
And now he is pursuing the replacing of the elector system with a direct, popular vote, something he considers a long-overdue and just way to choose our commanders in chief.
One might look at these three efforts – spread over the past nine years — and call them unsuccessful.
Try saying that to Jones, and he responds with a wide smile. He couldn’t disagree more.
‘Use your brains’
“I got people thinking. My goal is to get you to use your brains,” he said during a Friday afternoon interview at his sunshine-filled home just outside town.
“I’ve enjoyed life tremendously,” Jones added. “I’m the luckiest person in the world because I keep finding things,” things to explore.
These days he’s circulating a petition to do away with the Electoral College, the system of 538 electors who, acting as go-betweens for the voters, select the U.S. president every four years.
Jones considers this process a relic, one that denies equal rights to the voters of each state.
The Electoral College is unconstitutional, he believes.
Discussion groups
Now Jones is seeking to start a discussion group on the issue and welcomes e-mails at cvjones@olypen.com and phone calls at 360-681-0101.
About six years ago, Jones began another group: the Juan de Fuca Freethinkers, who continue to meet monthly at the Sequim Library, 630 N. Sequim Ave.
Clover Gowing, keeper of the Freethinkers roster, describes the group as “people who like to pursue reason over dogma,” and who “feel the pressure of being secular in an increasingly religious environment.”
Some of the Freethinkers are atheists and some are agnostics, but “we invite anyone,” Gowing emphasized.
The next meeting, which will be on Wednesday, will start with a social time at 6:30 p.m., to be followed by guest speaker Kenneth Littley, whose 7 p.m. talk is titled “Liberal Freemasonry: A Short History.”
To find out more about the Freethinkers, phone Gowing at 360-683-5648 or e-mail gowing@olympus.net.
The group was at first called the Skeptics and met in Jones’ living room, Gowing said.
It outgrew that space, and participants gave it the Freethinkers name since that seemed more inclusive.
Gowing credits Jones’ intelligence and questioning nature for propelling the Freethinkers into existence.
‘Fun to know’
“He has an astronomical IQ,” she said. “And he’s fun to know.”
Gowing met Jones at the Clallam County Fair in August 2001 when he was selling his invention, the Dandy Digger.
It’s a weed-pulling spear that, in a sense, symbolizes Jones’ drive to uproot things he believes don’t belong in our lives.
In one case, though, Jones pushed for something he wanted put in, not taken out: a pair of stop signs at the intersection of his street, Evans Road, and Old Olympic Highway.
Around 15 years back, he gathered neighborhood support to make that corner safer by converting from a two-way stop to a four-way.
To drivers these days, the four-way stop feels like it’s always been there.
Jones has lived on 5 acres on Evans Road for 18 years now; he moved up from Laguna Niguel, Calif., after a series of careers that, in the telling, sounds like a coat of many colors.
He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1950 with a degree in accounting and finance, went to work at a camera shop in Santa Monica, Calif., and then toiled as a darkroom film processor at the Technicolor studio in Hollywood.
He left after two years because, he said, “anyone who had worked there for any length of time looked like they were 60 years old.” He was in his mid-20s.
Jones then opened his own shop, Clint’s Camera, in Van Nuys, Calif. Somewhere in there, he considered becoming a Presbyterian minister and spent time in a seminary.
But Jones realized he wasn’t minister material, and at age 28, up and moved to Italy to study opera.
Professional singer, salesman
He became a professional singer and moved to New York City, where he performed at Radio City Music Hall and other venues.
Yet another career change turned him into a salesman for the National Merchandising Corp. in Boston, where he sold advertising for telephone book covers.
Then he started his own advertising business in Orange County, Calif.
Sales wasn’t all that different, to his mind, from singing on a stage.
“Selling is putting on a show,” Jones said. “You don’t get paid until the show’s over.”
Jones believes his wide-ranging interests stem from a set of books he dived into as a boy.
“We had the Encyclopedia Britannica in the house,” he said. “I used to thumb through it,” and then, as his education continued in college and in the seminary, he came to understand that “you can pick up any topic and find that everything connects with everything else.”
‘Reflections’
Not surprisingly, Jones has written a book, a pocket-size paperback titled Reflections, that he calls “my own bible.”
The 1988 edition is dedicated to his only child, Yvonne Marie.
“In her early years was a great inspiration and helped me to understand love and happiness,” Jones wrote.
His daughter now lives in Toledo, Ohio, with her husband and three children.
Reflections is a quick but provocative read, with Jones’ thoughts on friends, life’s purpose and other topics, each given its own page.
“Friends are gifts . . . they should be cherished and enjoyed,” Jones wrote. “Friendship is a gift of our creator to enrich our lives.”
On hatred: It’s “due to a lack of understanding. We fear what we do not understand; we hate what we fear.”
Under “Simple”: “Life is simple. We are the only ones who make it otherwise.”
And on the page headlined “Many Lives,” Jones notes that “Life is a living chain of experiences, each of which is an existence. Like a movie, our lives are composed of many picture frames, each a story itself.
“Every new experience is a rebirth, a reawakening.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.