Searcy editor Jones dies at 80

Perrin Jones, a longtime consumer-protection investigator with the Arkansas attorney general’s office and the editor of the Searcy Daily Citizen from 1954-86, died Monday in his Little Rock home.

Jones, 80, died from cardiopulmonary arrest, said his sister, Anna Murray.

“During the last two or three months, he was in and out of the hospital,” Murray said. “He was such a fighter, but he never complained.”

Jones’ fighting spirit was honed during his newspaper career. His family owned the Searcy Daily Citizen for three generations, and Jones became editor in 1954.

“He loved it,” Murray said of his journalism work. “He lived it.”

Jones fought against White County selling alcohol and denounced the “damp” places in the county, like Bald Knob, that allowed sales.

Despite receiving death threats, Jones continued writing about the issue, Murray said. His stories ultimately led to the county becoming entirely dry, she said.

“He always felt it was a character thing,” she said of her brother. “He said he thought alcohol, like gambling, would bring in the wrong kind of people.

“He had such strong opinions and convictions,” she said. “But he was kind and softhearted, too.”

In a 2011 interview with Searcy Daily Citizen reporter Luke Jones, Perrin Jones recalled an exchange with a Louisville, Ky., newspaper editor.

The editor told Perrin Jones that Arkansas authorities arrested a man in a woman’s murder in Louisville and asked Jones to interview him at the jail.

During a 30-minute interview with Jones, the prisoner described how he killed the woman.

“You mean he admitted it?” the Kentucky editor asked, according to Luke Jones’ story. “We hadn’t gotten any confession on that.”

“Well, I have,” Perrin Jones replied.

Jones also was instrumental in getting the Legislature to pass the state’s Freedom of Information Act in 1967. He was a founding member of the Arkansas Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists, which lobbied for the act’s passage.

In 1991, the Arkansas Press Association honored Jones with its Golden 50 Award for his newspaper service.

Even after the family sold the newspaper and Jones went to work for then-Attorney General Winston Bryant in 1991, he continued writing a weekly column for the newspaper.