Regatta Fouder Nelson Jones Dies at 52
Charleston Gazette
25 July 2010
By Sandy Wells
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Nelson Jones, boat lover, river industry icon and
founder of the Charleston Sternwheel Regatta, died Sunday afternoon
at
CAMC Memorial Hospital after an arduous war with cancer. He was 52.
He was president of Amherst Madison, a marine
transportation, construction and repair company in Port Amherst.
He fell in love with boats and the river as a boy hanging out at Port
Amherst, his father's river transportation business. "The only family
vacation we ever took was on a boat," he said in a 1997 feature story.
"I was fascinated by everything that happened on the river."
Born into an affluent Charleston family, he preferred blue-collar labor
on the docks and drinking beer after work with deckhands to hobnobbing
at the country club.
Tall, blonde and boyish with a contagious enthusiasm for pet projects,
he had a Pied Piperish knack for organizing events and recruiting
people to help make them happen.
At age 12, he mentioned the idea of a sternwheel race to his surrogate
mother, Henny Cook, executive secretary to then Mayor John Hutchinson.
Cook encouraged him to present the idea to the mayor. On Sept. 5, 1971,
he corralled five sternwheelers and launched the regatta. Thousands
lined the banks to watch the majestic sternwheelers parade up and down
the river.
"When we started, it was a big thing to get five sternwheelers to agree
to come," he said in the 1997 interview. "It took someone with a lot of
time and persistence to make them to where they would come. They
got tired of hearing from me."
He added river-oriented events and provided barges and other necessary
equipment as the event grew into a mammoth week-long festival that
attracted more than 30 sternwheelers and hundreds of recreational boats.
Citing philosophical differences with the commission and dwindling
interest in boating events, he resigned from the Charleston Festival
Commission in 1997. Two years later, he returned to the fold, but bowed
out for good in 2001.
He embraced any opportunity to hit the river. Most at home at the helm
of a towboat or paddlewheeler, he relished telling river tales and
dispensing morsels of river history.
Like a kid collecting Tonka toys, he loved to buy boats, especially
ones he could refurbish. Many were christened during festive gatherings
at the levee. He named most of his boats for employees and several for
community leaders.
He studied business management and marketing at what was then Morris
Harvey College, but only for the sake of a college degree. "My love was
the river," he said in the 1997 story. "I wanted to run a crane and
pilot a boat, but I knew I had to get an education."
He was 24 when his father put him in charge of Madison Coal and Supply
and challenged him to revive the struggling company. Today, it operates
a fleet of more than 33 towboats.
In 2006, he helped establish a museum of river artifacts on the Amherst
grounds. In cooperation with the Huntington District Waterways Assn.,
he also was a guiding light in the "Navigating River History"
educational programs staged for schoolchildren in St. Albans for
several years.
He is survived by his wife, Robyn Strickland; stepsons, Carl and Caleb
Simpkins; father and stepmother, Charles T. and Mary Ellen Jones;
sisters, Laura Ellen Pray and and Jennifer Hill Jones; brother, C.
Tandy Jones; stepdaughter, Heather Strickland; and grandsons, Nate and
Aaron Ballard.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete on Sunday.
Reach Sandy Wells at san...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5173.