Ada Jones of Modesto, the subject of a famous Dust Bowl photo, dies at 97

Ada Jones, who died Jan. 15 at 97, was one of thousands of Modesto-area residents with roots in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Mrs. Jones had a special claim to fame: She appears in one of the best-known photographs from that era, working a water pump with another girl in a wind-blasted Colorado town.

Mrs. Jones, whose maiden name was Owen, went on to marry Orville Jones, whose 49 years of ministry included pastor at Bible Baptist Church of Modesto. He died in 2006. They had four children, six grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.

The 1935 photo is not as famous as the Migrant Mother, which features Florence Thompson, who also ended up living in Modesto. But it does convey the hardship of the Dust Bowl era, when drought and the Depression forced mass migrations from the Great Plains.

The water pump photo has an oddball twist: It wasn’t until 2002 that Ada Jones was identified as one of the girls.

The photo had appeared without her name in a Sept. 1, 2002, story in The Modesto Bee about a campaign to get Californians to read “The Grapes of Wrath.” The 1939 novel by John Steinbeck follows migrants from Oklahoma to the San Joaquin Valley.

Mrs. Jones contacted The Bee several days later and said she was the girl on the left in the photo. To prove it, she brought in another shot of herself in the same jacket.

Mrs. Jones said the photo had been taken by a local newspaper photographer in Springfield, Colorado. Her mother kept the clipping for years, but it eventually was lost.

One other twist: Mrs. Jones said the wind actually wasn’t too bad that March day, but the photographer had them hold handkerchiefs to their faces for dramatic effect.

“I told the photographer that he should have come a few days before, when the sky was black with dust and you couldn’t see across the road,” she said. “Then we would have needed those handkerchiefs over our noses.”

Mrs. Jones was 13 at the time of the photo. Her family migrated to Washington state, where she finished high school. She later moved to Southern California and in 1967 to Modesto.

The day she visited The Bee, Mrs. Jones brought a two-page history that she had just written about her childhood in Colorado and Oklahoma. She recalls milking cows when she was 6 and carrying water by bucket. She wore dresses sewn from flour sacks and slept on a mattress stuffed with feathers from the family’s chickens. They had no electricity.

“We ate a lot of biscuits,” Mrs. Jones wrote. “Most of the time (although a loaf of bread was less than 10 cents) we would take a biscuit buttered and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon for school lunches. Sometimes we had a boiled egg in our lunch pail.”

The tiny houses were crowded, she said, but the large family got through.

“We were often reminded that if we did not work together and help each other, we could not survive.”

A service for Ada Jones will be at 10 a.m. Monday, Jan. 28, at Salas Brothers Funeral Chapel, 419 Scenic Drive, Modesto.

This story was originally published January 24, 2019 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Ada Jones of Modesto, the subject of a famous Dust Bowl photo, dies at 97."