<hi rend="bold">Oral History Interview with Julia Virginia Jones, October 6, 1997. Interview J-0072. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007):</hi> Electronic Edition. The Professional Development of a Female Judge Jones, Julia Virginia, interviewee Interview conducted by Friedman, Nancy Sara Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview. Text encoded by Mike Millner Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers Southern Folklife Collection First edition, 2006 161 Kb The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2006.

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 Oral History Interview with Julia Virginia Jones, October 6, 1997. Interview J-0072. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series J. Legal Professions. Southern Oral History Program Collection (J-0072) Nancy Sara Friedman 321 Mb Chapel Hill, N. C. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 7 October 1997 Oral History Interview with Julia Virginia Jones, October 6, 1997. Interview J-0072. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series J. Legal Professions. Southern Oral History Program Collection (J-0072) Julia Virginia Jones 101 p. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 7 October 1997 Interview conducted on October 6, 1997, by Nancy Sara Friedman; recorded in Charlotte, North Carolina. Transcribed by Unknown. Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): Series J. Legal Professions, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Original transcript on deposit at the Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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 Library of Congress Subject Headings Documenting the American South Topics English Women and Women's Roles Marriage & Gender Roles 2006-00-00, Celine Noel and Wanda Gunther revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition. 2006-05-22, Mike Millner finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing. Interview with Julia Virginia Jones, October 6, 1997. Interview J-0072. Conducted by Nancy Sara Friedman

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Citation of this interview should be as follows: “Interview J-0072, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill”

 Copyright © 2006 The University of North Carolina Abstract

Julia Virginia Jones was born in rural Shelby County, North Carolina, in 1948. The civic and professional activism of her mother and grandmother weighed heavily on Jones's definition of femininity, and she points to her father's abrupt death as forming a defining moment in her perception of gender roles. Rather than assuming married life would offer her lifelong security, Jones came to realize that she needed to be able to support herself independently. Religion played a significant role in her family, as did Democratic politics. The religious lessons Jones learned included tolerance and the omnipresence of God. Given the changing racial climate of the 1960s rural South, Jones admits her disenchantment with her church. Jones purposefully chose an all-women's college, Queens College, to develop her academic and leadership skills. She married her husband immediately after her undergraduate graduation and decided to follow him along his career path. She worked as a teacher, which resulted in unhappiness, so she applied to law school, accepting a full scholarship at Wake Forest. After clerking two years for Judge Woodrow Wilson, she obtained an associate position with the Moore & Van Allen law firm. In 1990, she was elected district court judge. She was undergoing cancer treatment at the time of this interview: she affectionately labels her supportive friends and family as "Fighting Okra" because of okra's raw strength and tenacity, characteristics she sees in her supporters.

 Short Abstract

Judge Julia Virginia Jones traces the development of her professional career, which culminated in a federal judgeship. She illuminates the impact her gender had on her growth in the legal field.

 Interview with Julia Virginia Jones, October 6, 1997. Interview J-0072. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Interview Participants JULIA VIRGINIA JONES, interviewee NANCY SARA FRIEDMAN, interviewer [TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You were born August 30, 1948 in Shelby, North Carolina. Did you know your grandparents?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I was very fortunate, both sets of my grandparents, lived in Shelby. In fact they lived across the street from each other, and all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins lived within about a mile of each other. So, I had a very large extended family. We walked back and forth to each other's houses. Spent the night. Very much of a community. I even knew my great grandparents. One on each side. My great grandmother on my father's side, and my great grandfather on my mother's side. So, I was very fortunate to have a long family history, and lots of great aunts and uncles too.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What do you remember most about your grandparents?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, my great grandfather was quite a business man. Always dressed up in his suit, even when he was in his 80s. Fairly formal. I don't have any real . . . . We were kind of dressed up in our Sunday clothes when we went to see him, so most of my memories are sort of formal showing off the grandchildren type thing. Now my grandfather on my father's side lived to be 99, and he also everyday would get up and shave, and put on a coat and tie and go sit in the living room. This was after he was blind and deaf, but people came to visit him because he was a very very interesting person. He was often on the wrong side of the law. I don't think I learned any or had any ideas about going into law because of him. He, because of some good lawyers, did not go to prison over some business deals but he was quite an interesting character.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Do you remember particular instances, or is that pretty much the broad picture?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I don't remember any particular instances.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, your grandparents - you said that you all lived in the same . . . ..

 JULIA V. JONES:

I will tell one tale on my grandfather. My grandfather was charged with tax evasion by the federal government. In fact, Mr. Thigpen, the senior from Charlotte, and Guy _____ were his lawyers because Guy was his cousin too and that is how things went back then. This was in about 1950 - in the 50s - and I knew that the government took all of my grandfather's money, and I knew he didn't go to prison, but I never knew why he didn't go to prison. Now remember this happened in the 50s. Well, my grandfather died in 92, at the age of 99, and I asked one of my cousins. I said, I always knew about grand daddy and the tax boys. Anyhow he didn't think you had to pay taxes if you earned it in a different county, but what I never knew was why he didn't - how they kept him out of prison. My cousin said, "Well, don't you know that he had a bad heart and they convinced the judge that he would surely have died immediately if he had gone to prison." Of course he lived 40 more years after that. So, that's kind of the story of my grandfather.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, you saw your grandparents as both grandparents and as sons and daughters, was that an interesting role for you to see?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, a little bit, particularly watching my grandmother take care of her mother-in-law who lived there. This is the same grandmother of the grandfather that got into tax trouble. She worked outside of the home. She worked as a sales clerk in the 30s which was very very unusual, and she worked for the Jewish family that had the clothing store. There were, to my memory, maybe two Jewish families in Shelby and one of them had a clothing store, and she worked for him. That was very unusual for her to have been working outside the home. She also was a registrar at the precinct for voting. Was very active in the community, and very active politically. I have always thought that I got some of my political interest from my grandmother, Florence, because she was always out in the community and I think what both she and her husband taught me was that community is important, and again, even though my grandfather got into trouble, he was also in the Rotary, the Jaycees, and did a lot of civic things. And my grandmother, as I say, worked outside the home; also worked as a registrar, and the other thing that they did that was a little bit unique was they always worked at the county fair. Shelby had the largest county fair in the United States. It was started by Dr. Dorton, the same person that the Dorton Arena is named for. He is a veterinarian who was from Shelby, and he started the North Carolina State Fair as well as our local fair and my grandmother always worked as a judge of the pies, cakes and jellies at the fair. At Christmas, we had a ritual. They always bought the prize winning country ham, and every Christmas eve we had the same menu. We had country ham, rice, green beans, pound cake and cheese biscuits. Now, another thing that I found out about my grandmother later on, was that she did not always make that pound cake. It was her recipe (Here comes the train by my house. We are going to have to stop until the train goes by.) Anyway, many years later I found out that Granny Florence didn't make those pound cakes. She paid somebody to make them for her, and somehow I liked her even better to think that I had this grandmother who could choose whether to be in the kitchen or not. Not that being in the kitchen is not great; I love to cook, but she could choose, and if she would rather be out working at the store, she would have somebody make the pound cake. My other grandmother, who I am named for, Julia, was just the opposite. She was a complete homebody. Her job was to be the perfect homemaker and she was. She had two separate rose gardens to cut from. In the front yard those were the flowers for the people who walked by to see. The cutting garden was in the back yard, and when my grandfather plowed for the vegetable garden, he plowed about four or five rows that were planted with nothing but flowers to cut. So, there were fresh flowers in every room, every day. Meals were, as you can imagine, country breakfast, because before breakfast we had been up picking vegetables since 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning in the summer, and would come in and eat sausage and liver mush and baked apples and sliced tomatoes always in the summer. And eggs and grits and biscuits. Lunch was generally two meats, corn bread, biscuits, and five or six vegetables, and then supper was usually cold. Leftovers from lunch, but quite a feast.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Did you go there often for breakfast?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Oh yes, because my father . . . .. it's real funny, this was his father-in-law, but my father was very interested in picking the vegetables and so usually daddy and I would go pick vegetables and then have breakfast with my grandma.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, that was the grandmother Julia that you were named after - that was your father's side?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Mother's side. It is very confusing because my father was very active with my mother's parents. My father was the caretaker of the older generation. He took care of his parents; he took care of my mother's parents; he took care of the great aunts and uncles. He was a caretaker. He dropped dead of a heart attack at age 48, and sometimes we think it's because he just took care of too many people, but he was the caretaker for everyone.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, did he know your mother when they were growing up? Did they grow up in Shelby?

 JULIA V. JONES:

They grew up together, and knew each other, but they really didn't start courting until after the war - until after World War II. Mother had finished college, and came back and daddy was working. Even though my grandparents lived across the street when I was growing up, they didn't when my parents were little. So, they didn't really start, even though they knew each other, they didn't start dating until after the war. Then they got married, and had four children, and daddy died in 1971. Mother, at that time, was also 48. I had graduated from college, but I had a sister who was a sophomore at Chapel Hill, a sister who was in high school, and a brother who was 14. Mother basically worked minimum wage at the hospital as a volunteer coordinator, and with social security put the rest of the kids through school. So, she certainly was an influence in my life, that you can do what you want to do through hard work. I think, also, the fact that my father died suddenly, influenced me. I've talked to my two sisters about this. Both of my sisters worked outside of the home for a long time. They are now raising children, but one was a banker for about ten years, and the other sold real estate. We all agreed, we realized that when daddy died that even if you were happily married that was no guarantee of someone to take care of you.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

I'm just going to bring you back a little bit, just to talk more about your dad. Did he go to college?

 JULIA V. JONES:

He went two years to Western Carolina. He played football. He was on a football scholarship, but in 1942 he joined the navy and he was a bomber pilot. He flew off of aircraft carriers, and according to my uncles he was quite a hero. That he made many hits. He only landed in the ocean once, and they laugh about it I guess because he got out alright. He did not talk about the war, and I couldn't decide whether he didn't talk about it because his three oldest children were girls and he just didn't know how to talk to girls or what, and the reason I say that is that when I started going out with a man who was in the navy, my father talked to him about it, but he did not talk to us. But my favorite story about daddy . . . In the service, if you grow up in Shelby there's not a lot to do, so you learn how to play cards. It's a big card town. I learned to play bridge when I was in about the fifth grade, and play bridge every hot summer afternoon from 1-3 until I graduated from high school. Mother even taught bridge to supplement her income at one time. Daddy taught me how to play poker, of course. So they tell the story they are on the aircraft carrier, and it is hot down in the quarters down below. So, they are not in uniform. Basically they've got their skivvies on. So, they are sitting around the table playing poker, and daddy is winning big time and he keeps winning and people drop out, and they drop down to two people - daddy and one other man, and daddy basically cleans house. So, the next morning they get up to go up on deck, and it turns out that the man that daddy took all his money was his commanding officer, and so he got a lot of grief from his cohorts about taking all the money from his commanding officer and what kind of duty he would get. Of course, nobody knew it the night before because they didn't have on their uniforms. My father was fun. He would get down on the floor and ride us piggy back. Very much a presence in our lives. He sold real estate, and just about the time he died had become successful. He had struggled financially before then, and as I say he also spent a lot of time taking care of people. He was president of the Jaycees. President of the Rotary. He helped get the merry-go-round for the park, and different things like that, but unfortunately died at age 48.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You said that he had some financial difficulties career wise when you were growing up. How did that affect the way that you were raised?

 JULIA V. JONES:

We were land poor. Particularly on my mother's side there is a tremendous amount of land. As I mentioned, my grandfather was quite a business man, and he had bought up a lot of property that was very valuable where they put a new road, and of course that brought in new business. When he died the land was, of course, still there and so we had all this property. Huge farms, but we didn't have much money, and we all had nice houses. That was the other thing. My grandparents lived on this side, my mother's side, in a mansion because they bought this back when they had a bunch of money, in the 40s, and my parents built a very nice little brick ranch house. So, I always felt like I had enough money, but we weren't rich and I couldn't have Weejans. I had to wear what Penney's sold. I remember when I got my first Villager sweater when I was a junior in high school. I had earned the money working in a jewelry store, but I never felt deprived because we certainly had plenty of food because we had these huge gardens and farms and my grandmother cooked and baked. But I knew it was a struggle for my father, and I knew that when I went to college that I wanted to go to a small woman's college because in the 60s that was . . . First of all, Chapel Hill didn't let women in unless you were going to be a nurse, and I didn't particularly want to be a nurse at that point in time. So, I wanted to go to a small woman's college, but I made up my mind that I had to have a scholarship that would pay the same amount as if I was going to a state supported school like UNC-G which was women's college at that time. So, it really influenced me about money. The other thing was, I always had a job. I had my first job when I was fourteen, and that was my first job I should say outside of the home. I'll talk about what I did before that in a few minutes. When I was fourteen I worked at a grocery store and I was too young, the law wouldn't let me handle money, but I could weigh out penny candy, wrap presents, stock the shelves, and that's what I did the Christmas I was fourteen. Then after that I worked in a jewelry store from Thanksgiving to Christmas every year until I graduated from college. Before I was fourteen, from the time I was about ten, I sold vegetables out of my grandfather's garden. Daddy and I would go pick in the morning before breakfast. I would put them in my bicycle basket and go up and down the street selling them. Of course they were delicious, and of course because they had been picked that morning my grandfather made me give thirteen ears of corn for every dozen, and an extra tomato for every pound. So, I got such a reputation that people would start calling the night before and place orders and so the next morning I would pick and bag and they would come pick it up. That's how I made my money to go to summer camp, because I also always wanted to go to summer camp but my family couldn't afford that. So, I sold vegetables until I graduated from college too, and my sisters and brothers kind of took over as we went along. I never bought a vegetable or a fruit, in the grocery store, until I was over 30. It was a rude awakening to have to go buy produce, because even when I was married and lived in Boone, my grandfather would pack the station wagon with everything from June apples, to sweet potatoes, to onions, to tomatoes and drive the two hours to Boone to bring us our vegetables for the month, and he would come up a couple times in the summer when my husband and I lived there.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

How did you balance picking the vegetables and selling them, and then still going to school?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, I only did that in the summer. In the winter I only worked between Thanksgiving and Christmas, after school, at the jewelry store. I did not work full-time during school. I studied a lot. I was lucky that we had a very good high school. At the time I didn't think so, but we did. School was important. My mother really valued education, and that was very very clear. I think, she had a college degree and somehow she thought it was important that her daughters, as well as her son, have a college degree. So, there was never any question about going to college. Now, I wasn't quite sure why, because you got married and raised children, and I didn't quite understand why you went to college I just knew you did.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, did your mom work?

 JULIA V. JONES:

She started working when I was in high school, and she worked as a social worker which was her training. She did that through a government program with Richard Nixon, of all presidents. I don't think people remember kind of how much money there was for social programs during that era, but it did dry up and after that she went to work for the hospital. So, I always worked at some entrepreneurial . . . . We also baked cookies for the fair, and won prizes there. That was kind of our money to spend at the fair.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What was your relationship with your brother and sisters like when you were growing up?

 JULIA V. JONES:

The family order is I'm the oldest, there's four years between me and the next sister, and her name is Jean Ann. Then two years and there's Linda, and then another two years and Thomas. There's nine years difference between Thomas and me. Growing up I was the babysitter, and I had a lot of responsibility. I liked my siblings, but I was not friends with them. Basically they were the kids I babysat with. Now, as adults, we are best friends. All of us. I mean, we are so close, and even though my sisters are not close geographically (one is in Los Angeles, and one is in Connecticut - my brother's in Newton) we still see each other and talk on the phone two, three times a week. We are very very close.

I want to tell a story about money, and being rich or poor. The sister that is four years younger than I, she thought we were poor, and I asked her why she thought we were poor. [This is as an adult we are talking about this, not as kids.] She said, "Well, don't you know." And I said, "Well, no." And she said, "Well we had a fire and our house burned." And this is true. Lightening struck our house in the summer of `61 or `62, and it did - it burned, and we had to move out for six weeks, and it was fairly traumatic. Also, because daddy got hepatitis in the middle of all that. So, it was a very traumatic time, but Jean Ann said, "You know, in Sunday School you took clothes to children whose houses had burnt," and so she thought we were poor because our house burned. I said, "Okay, when did you decide we weren't poor?" And she said, "Well, don't you know the answer to that either?" And I said, "Well, no." And she said, "Well, about four years later we got a motor boat, and only rich people have motor boats." Well, now the truth of why we got the motor boat was, that daddy sold a house and the people didn't have enough cash to pay his commission, so they gave him this used motor boat. I think she was like eight at the time the fire happened, and she was like twelve at the time we got the boat, so she thought we were poor and then she thought we were rich. I always knew we were neither rich nor poor. We were fortunate. I always felt we were fortunate to have the family, and the resources we had even though when I was about eight, Dad almost filed bankruptcy. He didn't, but he was in a textile waste business that just didn't do anything.

One other interesting thing about my father. When he got out of the service he got his mustering out pay, and he started an oil refining recycling. Basically to recycle oil. There was all this oil that had been used in the war, and in the war they recycled it, and so he started this process for it. He thought he would have a very successful business. Unfortunately, with the war over everybody had new oil and there was no reason to recycle, and I like to think about my father as one of the early conservationist. If only he had had business.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

I haven't heard you mention religion at all as part of your growing up. Was that a large part of growing up?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. We went to the Methodist church. It was up on the court square, and it's a beautiful church. My father's family went there. Mother had grown up a Baptist, so she joined with daddy and very active. At one point my father was chairman of the board of stewards; I was president of the senior high MYF; my sister was president of the junior high; mother ran the girl scouts; my aunt was head of Methodist's Women. We went to church at least three times a week. Twice on Sundays, and usually Wednesday nights. But, it was a positive, happy, joyful place. Not at all a negative place, and I enjoyed going. I did go to church actively until I was a teenager. Then I started rebelling like everybody else, and when I was at home I went to church because my father saw to it that I went to church. By the time I went to college, even though I went to a Presbyterian. I went to Queens College - right here. Right in the heart of all the Myer's Park churches, I did not go to church except during exams. Of course I would go during exams. It was an excuse not to study, and praying for good grades. You got two for one. Growing up, I was at the church a lot. For girl scouts, and Wednesday night suppers. It was quite an influence. Church is a big influence in my life now. There was a long time in between, and now I'm a Baptist. I kind of laugh . . . . Let's see, my grandmother was a Methodist and she married a Baptist. My mother was a Baptist and she married a Methodist. I grew up Methodist, but changed to Baptist. So, we have gone full circle in our church. I go to Myers Park now, just here in Charlotte, and some people would question whether that is Baptist, but that is where I go to church anyway.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Shelby, on the whole, you said there was a Baptist church and a Methodist church, and maybe two Jewish families there. Was that pretty much the split in town?

 JULIA V. JONES:

There were a few Episcopalians, and a few Lutherans. The Baptists was the big church. I always used to refer to them as Hertz and we were Avis. They really had all the big youth programs, and were always doing exciting things, and having rock music in the sanctuary and things like that. They were kind of on one corner, and we were on the other corner. There were a fair number of Presbyterians; just a few Episcopalians, and a few Lutherans. Really, I would say Baptists and Methodists in Shelby.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What would you say you pulled out of the religion the most? What has carried through in your life?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I guess there are two things. One is that I truly believe, whether you are Jewish or Muslim or Christian, that tolerance of all people is important. That is what God's message is. The other thing is that God is with me. I truly believe that. I don't believe that God micro manages. That He comes down and says, "Julia you're going to have cancer and somebody else is going to get a divorce." But I believe that He is very aware of what everyone is going through, and is there with us. I had a really unique experience growing up, because I too worked for the Jewish merchant, Mr. Rosenthal. I learned more from him than I learned from almost anybody other than my family. I worked for him for seven or eight years, so it was a long time of my life and I think that helped me - it just gave me a different view that not everybody had the opportunity to have. It has been real interesting because through the years I've met a lot of people that knew the Rosenthals because they would come to Gastonia or Charlotte to worship because there wasn't anywhere in Shelby. That's been one of the nice things. Also, I just learned a lot of good things about life, about how to treat people, and the experience of working there. I count that as a major influence and advantage in my life.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You were talking about one of the things you learned was tolerance. How was Shelby as a town? Because of all these different groups, were they very tolerant or was it a narrow sort of town?

 JULIA V. JONES:

It was a fairly typical Southern town where groups did not mix; however, when I was a senior in high school the schools were integrated. We did not have any riots or major bad incidents. I think people were pretty tolerant even though they did not necessarily mix. I guess that is the way I would put it. Shelby is just a very typical small town, but I do think people there try to be tolerant. I left Shelby because I had been married and then back in Shelby with my husband and he established a law practice. When we decided to divorce, this was in 1979, Shelby was too small to have ex-husbands and -wives practicing in different firms. There were too many conflicts. People were having a hard enough time with women lawyers at that point in time, much less one that used to be married to a man lawyer, but then the other firm, "Oh my, what would we do about that?" So, I decided that I needed a job, and I needed to leave town, and that's how I ended up in Charlotte was for the job. That is why I left Shelby at that point in time.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Did you travel much in your family? Did you stay pretty much in Shelby because your whole family was in Shelby?

 JULIA V. JONES:

When I was growing up my family did not travel a lot, and that had to do with money as much as anything. But it's kind of the good and the bad. One of mother's cousins had a house up at Lake Lure which is this fabulous mountain lake about 45 minutes from Shelby, and their children were the age of the children in our family. So we would go up for say three weeks and the fathers would drive back and forth, because it was only 45 minutes. So, we would stay at this fabulous, and when I say fabulous I don't mean fabulous because it was fancy. It was fabulous because it wasn't fancy. The downstairs had concrete floors, poured cement, concrete block walls. You could throw your bathing suit down on the floor and it didn't matter! Nobody fussed at you for putting a wet bathing suit some where. You had to get up and put it on the next day, but nobody cared. It had a beautiful view. The water was wonderful. We water skied. No TVs or telephones, and so it was an intergenerational thing. You would play cards with the parents; you know, play bridge. It was an indestructible house. Even upstairs there were hardwood floors that you could just wipe up if you spilled. My other memory, of course, is food. Probably my biggest memory of childhood is food. At Lake Lure I can remember one time a neighbor from Shelby — a lot of people from Shelby had houses there — and one of the little boys came to visit and he went home and told his mother, he said, "Mom, they ate bushels of corn." Which was true, because we all loved corn. My grandfather would bring up, literally these bushels of corn and we might have 15 or 20 people at the house, and so we really did eat bushels of corn. We usually took a cook with us to the mountains. At that point, almost everybody had what we would call help. So, somebody's cook would go to the mountains and would cook. So, the fact that we didn't have money to go to the beach was not a deprivation. We would go to Lake Lure every summer, and about once every three or four years we would go to the beach for a couple of days. Two times, I can remember, we went to Florida, but that was because daddy's father (the land wheeler-dealer that didn't pay taxes) owned some property and motels in Florida. So, we would go down to one of grand daddy's motels. We would pile in the station wagon and go. That was the most we ever did. I've always had wander lust, so when I was a junior in college I wanted to go on the college European trip. So, this is getting into some of my other jobs. After my freshman year in college, I worked as a secretary at a concrete block company. All these builders would call me up and cuss because their blocks weren't there. I learned how to deal with that. I saved my money, and earned enough money so that the next summer I went on the Queens tour to Europe. Again, that was paid for with selling vegetable money, and the money from the block plant. We did not travel a lot. Now my parents would go to conventions. They would go to the Realtor's convention, or the Rotary convention, but that would be once every five or six years. I remember that the year daddy died it was my parent's 25th anniversary, and they were going to go to Hawaii which was a big deal. He died in August, and they were going in November. I was trying to think, I hardly remember my parents flying on an airplane anywhere when I was growing up.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

I'm going to keep pulling you back a little bit, if that's alright. Just to talk about your schooling. You went to Shelby . . . .

 JULIA V. JONES:

I went to the public high school, Shelby High School, which I accused of having, how did I put it, that the principal was the coach and the superintendent of schools was the athletic director. We had a huge football team and a huge football stadium, which was very common at that time for kind of medium sized towns. We also had four years of Latin, advanced Chemistry, Trigonometry. All kinds of courses that I was able to take that when I got to college I was way ahead of a lot of people. In fact when I got to college my freshman year, as I indicated I had a scholarship and I had to work for it, and the senior faculty member was head of the Chemistry department, and I was standing in registration line and this woman comes up and says, "Where's Julia Jones?" and I raised my hand, and she said, "Well, you are going to be my lab assistant." And I said, "Oh?" And she said, "Yes, you need to sign up for the Chemistry Lab on Monday, and you will be assisting me on Wednesday and Thursday. My last lab assistant came from Shelby High School, and she graduated, and you took Chemistry at Shelby High School, so I want you." Well, I hadn't even planned to take Chemistry. I mean I signed up for Botany or something, but I signed up for Chemistry and sure enough I ended up tutoring seniors in Chemistry and paying my way through school.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What were some of your favorite subjects in high school, or activities?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I love English. Reading books for credit is kind of decadent to me, and I had wonderful, wonderful teachers that truly made everything from Beowulf to Shakespeare to Catcher in the Rye come alive. I also remember my eleventh grade teacher telling me that how her father used to hide books. He was a professor at Converse, and of course she and her sister always got the books he hid and read. It was just interesting having a teacher tell you something like that. So, I love to read books.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Were you close to some of your English teachers?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, I was close to all of my teachers because I was a student, and a hard working student. I don't have a particular teacher . . . . Well, actually my seventh grade science teacher. I do have one teacher that I would say I was closest to for many years after school, and this was Miss Craver and she taught seventh grade science. She had arthritis and wore big clunky shoes, and she wasn't too tall, but I can remember sitting in class in seventh grade, and you can imagine. The way our schools were, you went to neighborhood schools until you wer in sixth grade, and then all seventh graders would get together. There was a guy who sat behind me flicking his cigarette lighter in the classroom, and I, of course, did not know what would happen. He was much bigger than Miss Craver. She just came back and put out her hand and in a tone of voice that was so commanding, said, "I'll take that", that he handed it over to her. I always admired her, and she always got the roughens, because she was so good. She and I stayed friends for many many years.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What, outside of class, did you do. You said it was a very big athletic school, and obviously class work too.

 JULIA V. JONES:

I was in the band. I played clarinet. Our marching band was a competitive band. We would go, in the fall, to Bristol, Tennessee for a weekend. We would go to Greensboro. It was quite a time consuming . . . . I was a terrible musician. I've never been able to carry a tune. I can read music, and I was tall, and they wanted somebody to carry a bass clarinet and not everybody could do it, so I played the bass clarinet in the marching band and it was fun. We had a big time. We got to go on a lot of trips, and band trips were fun. The other thing I did, was I went on church trips, I went on church retreats to the youth camps of church. Every summer I went to camp, to private camps and to Girl Scout camps - different kinds of camps. I always enjoyed being in the outdoors, and I think I didn't really realize that until I was 30, how much it meant to me to be out doors. Now, my favorite activity is hiking along the trail.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Did you do that when you were in high school?

 JULIA V. JONES:

No, I did not. It just never occurred to me. My family didn't do it. We didn't really camp. When I'd go to camp, I would go hiking and I always loved it.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You said you had saved money when you were working to go to summer camp. Was that during high school that you went to summer camp?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Right, during high school.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

And, where was the camp?

 JULIA V. JONES:

It's up in Western North Carolina. I went to a girl's camp for three weeks, two different years and met many friends, some people I am friends with today. It was your basic camp. It was not a . . . . If I was doing it over again, I would have gone to a different kind. This was a . . . . You stayed in a cabin. You played tennis. You could horseback ride. Arts and crafts. Almost what I would call a rich person's camp. If I were going to camp again, I would go to a camp where you actually camped out and learned camping skills. Even as a Girl Scout we would camp out overnight at the Girl Scout hut, but we did not really learn camping skills. I learned those as an adult, and wished I'd learned them younger.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, throughout this time obviously you are still active at your church and you were in the band. Is there anything that you can think of, somebody that was influential. You talked about teachers. I just want to make sure that we cover what values were important to you.

 JULIA V. JONES:

I knew education was important. That was very very important. I also knew that you were supposed to treat people a certain way, and that was a way that you . . . you know the Golden Rule. Everybody in my family practiced it in spite of the fact that there was certainly racism. I would not be telling the truth if I did not say that there was racism in my church, in my family, in my community. That was one of the reasons I left the church, because I had such a hard time with the fact that the three slum lords in town went to my church. We were raising money to send to poor people in Africa, and I just didn't get it. It was kind of like, well why are we not raising money to have indoor toilets for these people that live between my house and the church? That is really what made me leave the church because nobody . . . . I asked the question of my teachers, and did not get a satisfactory answer. I talked to my father about it, and his answer is that you don't leave the good because of the bad. That you go to church to take care of yourself, and try to show by example. That was not good enough for me at that time. I think he is exactly right now. At the time I was too rebellious. I can remember my cousin who was my age. We were going to start our own church, we were so mad about this. We were juniors in high school. Then we went off to college and that was the end of that.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What was your church going to be like?

 JULIA V. JONES:

We were certainly going to have all races. We were going to raise the money to take care of people here. We were going to teach tolerance. So, that is why I left the church. It's interesting. I have talked to a number of people my age that had similar feelings about that time. Even in my family, there was that symbiotic relationship. My grandfather had a Black man who worked for him, and my grandmother. James ate three meals a day at our house. He was epileptic. He got his medication. When my grandfather died, James went away and actually my uncle found him basically on the side of the road. So, my aunt and uncle then, even though they didn't have a garden, didn't really have any work, James came to their house every day and they would find something to do, but he would get his medicine and food until he died. It's just one of those Southern history issues that we have to deal with. One on one my family did a lot for both White and Black families that were not as fortunate. That was just another thing you did. I mean that was another value. If you had more than somebody else, you gave to them even if you didn't have a lot. I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

I know you said that you and most families had help in their house.

 JULIA V. JONES:

Rochelle was our cook and babysitter, and she came when I was about six, and she was probably fourteen, maybe. No, she was probably sixteen because she had had a child. I guess she was about sixteen, and she came to work for us and she and I are close to this day. She raised her daughter, her daughter graduated from college, is a teacher, and Rochelle . . .

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

 [TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

 JULIA V. JONES:

. . . .. hospital, and while she worked for us she did some training for that, and we encourage her to do that. She is a very special person. In fact, my first hospitalization was in `75 and I called Rochelle before I called my mother to see if she could come and stay with me.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Did she have a child while she was working for you, or was it before?

 JULIA V. JONES:

My memory is she had just had Peggy before she came to work for us. I know that is right because I was old enough and I don't remember her being pregnant. She must have had Peggy right before coming to work for us.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You said that you are close now. When you were growing up were you aware that she worked for you? How was that relationship?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I was aware that she worked for us, but I treated her just like I treated my mother. She got the same respect. She was the authority figure. I would have never sassed her, and I felt much more that she was a member of the family than that she worked. I'll share a little story about my cousins. I really felt like Rochelle was much more of a family member than someone who was working for us. I hugged her, kissed her, went to her house. I knew that she worked for us, but that was not the important thing, and I did what she told me to do.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, when you were in school, there were Blacks, there were Whites. You were saying it was an integrated school?

 JULIA V. JONES:

It didn't integrate until I was a senior in high school.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, how was that before? Was there another school?

 JULIA V. JONES:

There was another school, and I really didn't think that much about it because that's the way it was. In fact I was much more concerned about the church situation than the school situation.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

How as the church situation?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, meaning that the churches were not integrated and not only were they not integrated but the slum lords went to the churches.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, what was it like when your senior year when they decided to integrate?

 JULIA V. JONES:

It was not a big deal, frankly. Again, it was fairly smooth. I can remember eating lunch with a girl who was in my class. I just don't have a memory of it being big deal at all.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You said that you went to Queens College. You went straight to college from high school?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Yes.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What made you want to leave Shelby and come to Charlotte?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, I wanted to go to a small woman's college, so I applied to Queens and Salem and some other schools. There was a two year college in Shelby, but that was all. So, to get a four year education I had to come. Charlotte is almost like home. I used to come to Charlotte once a month to go to the orthodontist from the time I was about in the third grade on up. We would come down here to shop. We would come down here at Christmas. I was very comfortable and at home. It was already a second home. So, I came down here to Queens. It was great. It was all I wanted it to be. I loved going to the woman's college, and going off to men's colleges on the weekends and dating. It was great.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What was Charlotte like?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, SouthPark wasn't here. Everything was up town. Those are the main differences. You shopped up town, and SouthPark wasn't here. Park Road shopping center was here, but that's about all. A lot of it is the same. Myers Park was the same; the churches were there. Kind of my world in Charlotte is very much the same because I live not in the Myers Park neighborhood but in Elizabeth which is a small older neighborhood. There's a drug store on the corner, and now there's a grocery store that's not too far. I don't go to SouthPark. My mother calls and says, "Oh I see something in the newspaper at Belk's at SouthPark, could you go pick it up for me?" And I'll say, "Mom, I'll pay the UPS charges to have it shipped to you rather than drive to SouthPark." I don't drive in Charlotte. There is nothing I want at Carolina Place Mall, that I would drive out there for.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What were your impressions when you first left home, and you were a freshman? Was it a sense of freedom?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, that is what I was going to say. Yes, again because I was the oldest child it was a tremendous sense of freedom. It was great. I can remember my room, and my roommate whom I am very good friends with today. It happens to be a lawyer at Hunton and Williams in Richmond who's been there twenty-three years now, believe it or not.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Was she from Charlotte?

 JULIA V. JONES:

She was from Spartanburg, South Carolina.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What was her name?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Her name is Virginia Powell. I think she was president of the Richmond Bar a year or two ago. A very outstanding woman, but we just happened to be roommates. It was random pairing, and it was great fun, plus I loved classes. We had great professors. I liked everything about it, and it was freedom. I can remember going home. They wouldn't let us go home for about six weeks, and I remember going home for the weekend and I had a boyfriend in Shelby who was older than I was and was working there, and mother said you need to be in by 11:00. I looked at her and said, "Well, Mom, I've been gone six weeks and you don't even know where I've been these Saturday nights." And she said, "That's different. You're home now." It really was funny, and I decided that I had to obey her rules, but it was quite a sense of freedom for me.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Did your parents come visit you much, or did you go home much after that?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I went home at Thanksgiving, Christmas, but not that often. I liked college a lot, and I had a boyfriend in Shelby who I eventually married, but also he went off in the Navy for a couple of years while I was in school and so I would go to Washington & Lee, and Davidson for weekends, and it was big fun.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You said that you were a student. You loved classes. I'm assuming English was again one of your favorites, but do you remember teachers in particular?

 JULIA V. JONES:

My two things at Queens were English and Chemistry. After Dr. McCuen dragged me out of the line to be her lab assistant, I fell in love with her. She was a wonderful woman. She was one of the first women to get a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Chapel Hill, and her husband died young, and she ended up teaching at Queens forever, and we became very very close. She encouraged me to major in Chemistry, and I took a lot of Chemistry and then the day came for the semester of my junior year, Shakespeare and the Chemistry course I needed were taught at the same time. Well, it was a no-brainer. I took Shakespeare over Chemistry and ended up majoring in English much to her disappointment. But, it was again, they are going to give me grades for reading a book.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Do you remember being involved in organizations?

 JULIA V. JONES:

At Queens I was involved. We had a Greek community, and I was in a sorority, and I was president of the panhellenic council. I was also on the honor council for a short term period. Seems like I filled out a term for somebody. I don't remember. We were not encouraged . . . There were no teams. There were no sports teams. We had to take P.E. to graduate, but you didn't play tennis or basketball or volleyball. This was in the era that they didn't think women sweated. It was ridiculous. So, really it was just going to classes and being in sorority, and the sorority did - we did do-good things. I know there was a child who lived near the college that needed people to come and do what they called "patterning" exercises. The child had brain damage, and they wanted people, every two hours to come and move their arms and legs. This was like a year old infant, and our sorority took that on because you could walk from Queens to this house, and we would make sure there was somebody there. That was one project we just kind of did, and there were other things like that. Now, Queens also was integrated when I went to Queens, and I was very active in encouraging integration at Queens and integration of the sororities. I was very disappointed in the fact that they did not integrate. One did, the other three did not, the year I was there. Again, I think we integrated either my junior or senior year, and that was a big issue that I was active in. Again, I was pretty disappointed in the way a lot of the alums and people acted about the sororities, but they eventually got integrated and that's what's important.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Queens at that time was a woman's college. You had said that you just knew you wanted to go to a woman's college. Why did you know that's what you wanted to do?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I wanted to do that because that is where the best professors were. If I couldn't go to Chapel Hill. The only other place I had thought about going to was Duke, and I gave it pretty serious consideration, but I really felt like that I needed the smaller school coming from a small town, and really the reason is because they had fabulous professors. For example, we had a major in Russian. Ted __________ taught Russian. You could take Russian literature. We had several women who graduated fluent in Russian. We had the Chemistry majors. We had several people go to med school. They really encouraged graduate school. You had to take the GRE to graduate. That was just part of your senior semester, whether you were going to graduate school or not. It was very academic, and that was why I wanted to go there.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You hear a lot today about women's colleges. The whole debate about they actually instill more confidence in women. Do you believe that?

 JULIA V. JONES:

At that point in time there was no question. I had leadership skills. As a result of being head of the Panhellenic council, I was on the President's Board and developed leadership skills that I never would have developed in 1966 through 1970 at a coed school. Now, I think that has changed. I think that women, just about anywhere, can hold their own, but I think certainly at that point in time the leadership skills would not have been as easily developed at a coed school.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

I know that you said growing up education was always important, but you weren't sure why. Did your parents expect that once you graduated to come back home?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, this is really weird, but they expected me to get married.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Really. Did you get married right away?

 JULIA V. JONES:

In fact I did. I lived up to their expectations. I married my high school sweetheart. He had been in the Navy and wanted to go back to college. He had dropped out. So, we moved to Boone and he went to Appalachian, and I went to Appalachian also to get a Masters in Education, and taught freshman English. It's a real lesson in money. He had about $200 he got from the GI bill, a month. I got about $150 from teaching. Our apartment cost $65. I think that included utilities. Now our apartment was a bedroom, a living room, a tiny little kitchen and bathroom. I used to joke and say that from the bathroom you could open the front door, make up the bed, cook the breakfast. It was tiny, but it was all we needed, and it worked out great. I've never felt as rich monetarily as those years at Appalachian because we didn't have any expenses. We had state tuition, and the GI bill. We had money. We never charged anything. We had a charge card for reserve, but we never used it. If we didn't have enough money we did not buy it. We never ate out. I cooked, and my husband was great. He would shop. He would also eat anything I cooked. He never complained. We would entertain, but entertainment meant beef stroganoff usually made with hamburger. But, we always had money. We had money to do anything we wanted to do. We did, at the beginning of the year, send $200 and buy passes to ski at Appalachian Ski Mountain. We went to the hardware store and bought used skis, and so we skied all year for $100. I think we paid $50 for our skis. So, we had our recreation. It was wonderful. It was as good as you can get being a newlywed. We had a great time.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

So, you married after you graduated from Queens?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Right. A month after I graduated from Queens, and then we moved to Boone that fall and went to Appalachian.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What made you want to go into teaching?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, that is the only thing women did. I mean, I didn't particularly want to be a teacher. I knew I didn't want to be a nurse. My father insisted . . . You talk about the small women's college. When I went to Queens there was not a major in Education. You could not major in Education. You had to major in an academic subject. Now you could take Education courses and get certified to teach, which I did, but I majored in English. So, when we went to Boone I couldn't get a job, and so this was the best money I could get. So, that is what I did. I taught freshman English for my scholarship at Appalachian. We were there two years, and then Bill decided to go to law school, and he got accepted at Chapel Hill. We moved to Chapel Hill. In the meantime we moved back to Shelby for six months because we finished in the spring, like March. Appalachian was on the quarters. I taught at a community college for about six months in Shelby. Then we moved to Chapel Hill and I taught at a junior high school. I taught at _____ Junior High and Oak Grove. I taught at two schools; one day at one, one day at the other. It was miserable. I did not like it. I had a crummy principal. He did not respect students, and I knew that I couldn't teach, and I did not want to eat lunch with seventh graders. So, my husband was in law school. I liked the women who were in his class, and I thought, well, it's three years. You don't have to write a dissertation, and you are reasonably assured of getting a job, and that is why I went to law school. I'd like to say it was to save the world, to make the world a better place. It was a very practical decision, and that's about the time my father died also, and that I realized that I would need to support myself and I best find something that I liked.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What were your siblings doing during this time?

 JULIA V. JONES:

One sister was at Chapel Hill. One sister was getting ready to go to Davidson, and my brother was in high school.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Was she at Chapel Hill — you keep talking about being a nurse — was she?

 JULIA V. JONES:

No, nobody is a nurse in my family. What is interesting is that my sister, when Bill and I were at Chapel Hill for law school, Jean Ann was there for undergrad, so we saw each other a lot. People confused us a lot, and it was pretty fun. Because she was dating a local Chapel Hill boy who was going to college there, but who'd grown up there, and I was teaching. The second year I taught at Chapel Hill high school, and so there is a lot of interaction. It was real funny. They would go, "Now wait a minute, you're not the person who dates Peter Barnes?" I go, "No, I'm her sister." So, that was kind of funny. Or they would say to Jean Ann, "You're not the teacher?" And she would say, "No, that's my sister." She was just in Chapel Hill. She majored in Journalism.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What was your favorite author or genre in English?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, I loved Shakespeare, but I loved all literature. Everything, and I do to this day. Now, I read a lot of Southern writers: Reynolds Price, Lee Smith. Just because I like them so much, although I read almost anything that comes my way. My junk reading is murder mysteries, and that is what I read when I don't feel like reading anything else.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

What year were you married?

 JULIA V. JONES:

'70.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

That was when . . . . I'm just a little confused . . . .

 JULIA V. JONES:

I graduated from Queens.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

That was that same year when your husband and you were both at Appalachian. Now he went to law school in Chapel Hill?

 JULIA V. JONES:

In '72.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

And that is when you followed him out?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Right.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Tell me what his impression, if you remember, of law school was.

 JULIA V. JONES:

Since he was going back to school as an older student, and really wanted to succeed, he worked like it was a job. He would go to the library and study from 8 to 5 and come home and eat supper and go back and study until 11. He thought it was very hard. He thought it was very cut throat, and it was cut throat. This was right after Vietnam, remember, '72 where we still have people who were in school to avoid the draft, and now we got people who are back home who want to go. So, it was very very cut throat, and he had a friend, one friend, and they went everywhere together, and he thought it was a struggle and hard.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

How did that effect you, not being in law school?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I think it is always harder when the other person is, when it is somebody you care about and you can't help them. I remember it was much more difficult for me when he took the bar exam than when I took it. Because I knew what I could do, and how hard it was for me, but I didn't know for him. He was petrified he would fail it. It was real funny. I was sick that summer, that was in '75, and we really almost divorced then and later we talked about how that he thought he was going to flunk the bar and I didn't care. I had all this surgery, and was ill, and I thought he didn't care. We got through that, but it was very difficult and we had to talk about it later on. Anyway, he is at Chapel Hill, so I want to go to law school, so I apply and the first year I applied to Chapel Hill and Central, but decided I couldn't go that year because we didn't have any money. So, I had to work another year teaching school, and saving money, and somehow I decided to apply at Wake Forest, and Wake Forest offered me a full scholarship. They were desperate for women in 1974, and so they offered me a full scholarship and I just couldn't turn that down. So, we decided to live apart, and I would live in Winston and he would live in Chapel Hill for his last year of law school. That's what we did, and it was a tough transition from Chapel Hill to Wake Forest. I had been wearing blue jeans and t-shirts, and at Wake Forest they wore suits and ties. I didn't, but it was tough. Fortunately, my housemate had been in Chapel Hill also, so she and I were the radicals at Wake Forest, but it worked out and it was good for me to go to Wake Forest. It was a good school. Taught me a lot, and certainly I wouldn't have had the job clerking for Woodrow Jones at the district court judge because he only hired Wake Forest people. I also think it has helped me, going to Wake Forest helped when I ran for election because a lot of Wake Forest people stay in North Carolina and so they know you, and when I ran state-wide I think that made a difference.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You had mentioned that there weren't many women when you first went to law school. Do you remember how many there were in your first year?

 JULIA V. JONES:

I think there were seventeen in my class. About 10 percent of the student body. Prior to that, in like the people who were second and third years, I think there were like maybe ten second years and about three third years.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

How do you think that affected your law school education, or did it affect your law school education?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, I think it probably made me study harder, but as far as what the professors did I don't think it made a difference. Some acted like creeps. Well, it's too long of a joke, but the very first day one of the professors told a sexist joke, and it was terrible because everybody laughed except my housemate and I and we didn't laugh. We got out of there and we thought "Oh my God, what have we done?" We got over it, and that was only one professor of many and most of them were great.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Were there women professors?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Yes, there were. They were good. I don't think it made any difference at all with the professors.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Do you remember any in particular that may have influenced your career choice, or even your self?

 JULIA V. JONES:

We had a Contracts and Constitutional Law professor who was wonderful because he taught you to think kind of outside of the box, and a lot of people hated him. In fact, his nickname was Foggy because they thought that he went off on these tangents. I thought it was wonderful because he taught you to analyze things from all kinds of points of view. His favorite line is you know just give the court something to hang their hat on, and then figure out what you can do. I've always tried to be open in thinking like that. Devine was his last name. I don't even know what his first name was because everybody called him Foggy. We had a lot of good professors. There was a professor named Shores who is still there, who taught Antitrust and Tax and I never thought I would like business stuff very much, but I took his courses because he was such a fabulous professor and I took all of them. I ended up not doing that. The real reason I ended up being in litigation was because I had clerked and because when I went to work at Moore & Van Allen they had hired a person who said that his goal in life was to never go into the court room, and so they needed a new court room person and there I was. It was really almost by default. As it turned out it was great, but I have to admit going to law school I had no clue what being a lawyer was. No clue, and all through law school I had no clue. I think that would be my . . . I don't know how law school is now, but I do not think that my law school education gave me a clue as to what being a lawyer would be. Not a clue.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You know how you hear all these horror first year stories about the Socratic method, and their teaching style. Was that at odds with what you had learned being a teacher?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, I was offended, because I was a better teacher than a lot of my teachers. So, I can remember a particular professor just boring with the Socratic method and terrible and belittling people and I didn't think encouraging learning at all. It was hard for me having been a teacher, but I also realized that I wanted to get out of there and that I wanted to have reasonably good grades and so I did not challenge too much. Although a male friend of mine reminded me that I did challenge a first year professor one year. I had forgotten it, but I did and I think I learned a lesson that you are not going to win if you challenge the professor. You're just not going to win. I must have learned that in that one incidence because I don't remember any others.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Do you remember the incident to tell?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Oh, it was about property and about how that right of survivorship and tenants in the entirety was to protect the little woman, and about how the husband could use all the rents and profits. There was some case in which there was a dissent in that I thought the professor misrepresented, and I raised my hand and I said, "Well, I think that it says this." I don't really remember what it was. That's what it was about. I know the topic, and he basically squelched me and that was that.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Did your husband encourage you to go to law school?

 JULIA V. JONES:

That's a long story. Yes and no. He encouraged me at the beginning because he really liked women in his class, but later as we went back to Shelby in the summers and he worked with some lawyers and saw how nice it was that their wives were at home cooking dinner for them, he really felt like that you couldn't have two careers. Unfortunately, he and I both knew that you can't put the cow back in the barn after she's out, and that I was on my way. That I was going to do it, and we talked about it, and both agreed that I was too far along. This was right before I was getting ready to start. This was after a summer in Shelby. So, I went on to law school and then I ended up two years in Shelby working for Woodrow Jones and then my husband and I divorced after that. So, it was not the going to law school. It was all the other things that people divorce about that happened.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Was your family supportive?

 JULIA V. JONES:

My family was very supportive. My husband's family was not supportive because I wasn't taking care of their little boy.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Your father had passed away while you were in college, right?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Right when I graduated.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

Okay, so how did that effect . . . obviously that was a great loss.

 JULIA V. JONES:

Well, it was but I think it also inspired me to go on to law school to take care of myself. I think that was a big factor.

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You also knew that your mother was then by herself and that she started to work in the community. Did you go home more often because of that?

 JULIA V. JONES:

No, not necessarily. Mother was pretty independent. Now Bill and I, I will say this, my ex-husband was fabulous as far as supporting my family, helping mother, and we probably went home a little more often to help her do things, but not a lot.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

 [TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

 NANCY S. FRIEDMAN:

You had said that you had done a clerkship with Woodrow Jones. Was it in your third year that you decided that you wanted to do that?

 JULIA V. JONES:

Yes, first of all, I had, I think, a non-traditional route to law school. An entire thought process. I did not interview with any large firms or small firms because I was married and planning to return to a town and live with my husband wherever that was. I really had no clue what lawyers did, and this is a true story about how I clerked for Woodrow Jones. He was sitting in the Dean's office at Wake Forest, at lunch time one day, and I walked in and I had on blue jeans and a t-shirt. Now it wasn't a t-shirt with a slogan, it was before that time, but still it was blue jeans and t-shirt. The secretary got me around the corner and she said, "Do you know where your roommate is. We've got Judge Jones here and he's supposed to interview her at 1:00, and he's here early and the Dean's not here, and here we've got this federal judge sitting out here in our office twiddling his thumbs." And I said, "No, I don't know where Judy is." Then I took a deep breath and thought about what I had on, and I said, "But I know Judge Jones because my husband has appeared in front of him and we live in the same area, and I'll just come out and chit chat with him a little bit." I had great trepidation of doing that considering the way I looked. I had not signed up to interview with him. The reason was because he wanted a two-year commitment, and at that point I really wanted to start a family and wasn't sure that I wanted to give a two-year commitment. I had interviewed at Legal Services, the Public Defender's Office and a couple places like that. That's what I was looking at. Anyway, to make this long story shorter, I walked up and introduced myself to the Chief District Court Judge for the Western District of North Carolina, in the Dean's Office at Wake Forest, in my jeans and t-shirt. It didn't seem to faze him one bit, and he said "Are you going to interview with me?" And I said, "No", and all of a sudden the truth popped out. And he said, "Well, my goodness we can work that out. You can have a family and work for me too. In fact I've been toying with the idea of having a permanent clerk, and you live in Shelby which is thirty minutes from Rutherfordton where I live, and that's something we could think about." Well, I mean, I hadn't even given any thought to this before this point in time. So, we talked a little bit and he said, "Well, I'm going to interview here today, and then I'll call you." That was probably around the first of November, and he called me and I drove up to Rutherfordton, I remember during the Thanksgiving break of 1976. I went up to his house, met his wife. I had heard the rumor that he really wanted people who lived in the area, because he found that if people weren't used to a small rural town in North Carolina that they were very unhappy. He didn't want an unhappy clerk. So, I interviewed with him. He didn't offer me the job on the spot, but I felt like I would probably get it, and sure enough he called me a couple days later and offered me the job. It was one of those situations that I was in the right place at the right time. I didn't plan it. Somebody was looking after me when I couldn't look after myself.

I did clerk for him for two years. It was a very positive experience. He is a wonderful man. It was a great transition for me from "liberal law school" to the real world. He was very much a real world person. Plenty of people described him as conservative. I think he was a true democrat, and thoroughly enjoyed working for him. We often had discussions about women, and minorities and I think I learned a lot from him, and he learned a lot from me. I remember when I got ready to leave, and I told him I was going to be working at Moore & Van Allen. He had had a woman clerk before, but she ended up teaching school. I was the first woman lawyer who he really knew intended to go practice in the court room. I always remember that she shook my hand and looked me in the eye, and said, "You can do it." So, it was really wonderful. He is very formal, and I remember the first year at Christmas, there was a secretary and a baliff and me. He chose to have a baliff to drive his car rather than two clerks. He had also been on the bench a long time, and he did not need much criminal work at all. I did mostly civil. We were trying to decide what to do for him for Christmas. We are Southern, and you do a little token. So, we decided to send him a poinsettia, and we did it at noon on the Friday before we were going to be out for the Christmas holiday. He came back after lunch with hot cookies that I assume he had his wife bake during lunch, because he just couldn't stand it that we had sent him something and he could not reciprocate. He was that type of a Southern gentleman and person. The fun thing for me was, he mellowed very much during the two years I was with him. I think one of the reasons he mellowed is that I went through a divorce the last couple of months, and he was very protective of me. I might have resented that at some other time, but I needed . . . My father died many many years ago, and so it was nice to have an older man. He took this very professional, but we became much closer friends because of my adversity and he became much less formal. As the years have gone by, he has become much less formal with everyone I think. Now, he may not like me saying that. I mean it certainly as a compliment. He is also the silver haired justice. He really did practice what he preached; worked hard; never expected me to do something he wouldn't do himself. So, anyway, I clerked for him, and as a result of clerking for him all the doors opened up for jobs.