Roll Call Tribute

Welton H. Jones, Jr. 

June 18, 1936 - December 17, 2022

The Mission Hills resident died of congestive heart failure Saturday at UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest. He was 86.

His wife of 38 years, Hollace “Holly” Jones, said that — true to her late husband’s ever-ebullient personality — he hid the seriousness of his condition and was still offering advice and chatting with friends about future plans right up until he passed.

To longtime readers of The San Diego Union-Tribune, journalist Welton Jones was a highly opinionated theater critic and an enthusiastic celebrant of the city’s arts scene. But to family, friends and his colleagues in the local historical preservation community, Jones was also a behind-the-scenes champion and fierce protector of San Diego’s cultural heritage.

Jones, a famously larger-than-life character who stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall, was an arts editor, writer, theater critic and critic at large for The San Diego Union-Tribune, and its predecessor, the San Diego Union, from 1966 until his retirement in 2001. He was also active in the historic preservation groups Save Our Heritage Organisation (SOHO), the Balboa Park Committee of 100 and the Save Starlight campaign.

Jones’ daughter Diana Cantu said that her father relished learning about many subjects — theater, music, art, books, the sea and local history — but his overriding passion was sharing whatever he learned with others and serving as “cheerleader” for the city.

“He was a big personality, full of passions and enthusiasms and very strong opinions about almost everything. More than a champion, he was an evangelist for the ideas and causes and things that he valued. He loved the thrill of the chase. But as soon as he discovered something, it was like a hot potato. He couldn’t enjoy it until he passed it along to somebody else,” Cantu said.

Born Welton Jones, Jr. on June 18, 1936, in Fort Worth, Texas, he attended high school in Lubbock, where Buddy Holly was a classmate. After earning a journalism degree at Texas A&M University in 1958, Jones spent three years in the U.S. Coast Guard, and 27 years in the Coast Guard Reserves, retiring as Captain.

He performed in community theater in his spare time. From 1961 to 1966, he was an arts and entertainment critic at the Shreveport Times in Louisiana. Then he moved west to join the San Diego Union staff.

The first theater review Jones wrote in San Diego was about a William Golding play at the Old Globe, which would become his favorite local theater. In summing up his all-time “top 10” favorite local productions for a 2014 article in the San Diego Reader, Jones included four Old Globe productions, including the 1967 staging of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” as his No. 1, calling it “an elegant, legendary stunner.”

“He loved Shakespeare and made a point of seeing everything the Globe did, from the time he got to San Diego until COVID came,” Holly Jones said. “ It was dear to his heart. He cried when the fires happened at the Globe (in 1978 and 1984).”

But that didn’t mean Jones ever went soft on the Globe, or any other local theater, in his reviews. Jack O'Brien, the Globe’s artistic director from 1981 to 2007, spotted Jones in the audience at the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle’s 2007 awards ceremony and famously said from the podium: “I see Welton out there, who was the first critic here to review me. He carved his initials on several parts of my body, and I have the scars to prove it.”

Longtime San Diego actor Bets Malone received her first Jones review at age 11, when she played the title role in San Diego Civic Light Opera’s early-'80s production of “Annie.” Malone said she and her mom would always tally the positive and negative comments in Jones’ critiques. If the pluses outweighed the negatives, that was considered a rave review.

During his years as a theater critic, Jones founded the first incarnation of the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle; served nine years on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association; and was on the jury that awarded Neil Simon the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991. Jones also founded New Heritage Theatre in the early 1970s, wrote several local history-inspired plays and musicals and served as an actor, stage director and props manager for many productions over the years.

As Jones moved from reviewing theater to serving as the newspaper’s critic at large in 1993, he began writing more stories about local passion projects, like the history of the city’s 20th-century faded movie palaces, the Zoro Garden nudist colony at the 1935-36 California Pacific International Exposition in Balboa Park and a 19th-century woman fencer known as “Jaguarina.”

Roger Showley, a Union-Tribune business writer who retired in 2018 after 44 years at the paper, described Jones as a truth-teller, a storyteller, a dogged researcher and “a walking encyclopedia of San Diego.” “Welton grew up in a different era of journalism,” Showley said. “He was the gumshoe journalist who didn’t let anything get in the way of him getting the story.”

One of Jones’ last major research and writing projects at the U-T was an exhaustive decade-by-decade history of the arts in San Diego in both the late 19th century and the 20th century. Michael Cavna, now a Washington Post arts columnist, was Jones’ editor on that project.

“What a yearlong project of passion,” Cavna said via email. “Welton equally delighted in the beautiful and the bawdy when it came to digging up a century-plus of civic movers and monuments, arts champions and sideshow charlatans. With boundless archival curiosity, Welton reveled in it all.”

After his retirement, Jones volunteered his time for numerous boards and committees, including Save Starlight, which is dedicated to saving from destruction the outdoor Starlight Bowl amphitheater in Balboa Park. Steve Stopper, founder and CEO of the 5-year-old nonprofit, described Jones as both a mentor and a father figure who tutored him on the ins and outs of state preservation laws and city politics.

“He was one of those guys who was always doing so much work in the background. Nobody knew how much,” Stopper said. “For the last few years I can’t think of more than one or two Sundays I didn’t have dinner at his house, where he mentored me on how to get things done. I learned so much from that guy.”

Jones also served on the nominating and heritage awards committee for the Balboa Park Committee of 100, which aims to protect and preserve the park’s original design and architecture. Committee President Ross Porter described Jones as a “one-man Wikipedia” on local history and many other subjects.

“He was bigger than life in so many ways,” Porter said. “I gained so much knowledge from his insights. Wherever my knowledge dropped off, his began. Welton loved a good story, and he was so much fun to spend time with.”

Jones is survived by his wife, Holly; daughter Diana Cantu of Ottawa, Canada (husband Ron Clifton); son Welton III of San Diego (wife Christianne Knoop); grandchildren Welton IV and Sophia; and brother T. David Jones and his family, of Kerrville, Tx.

A celebration of life is planned on February 11, 2023 in San Diego. The family suggests donations in Jones’ memory to the Balboa Park Committee of 100,1649 El Prado, Suite 2, San Diego, CA 92101, or email president@c100.org.