Harold Y. Jones, a graduate of Southampton High School, died March 17. He was 86.
Born in Bridgehampton on October 28, 1928, he attended Hampton Bays High School and graduated from Southampton High School. He earned a degree in journalism at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and won an Inter-American Press Association Scholarship, allowing him to study for a year in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He later obtained a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and a law degree from California College of Law.
He served from 1950 to 1952 in Company F 511th Airborne Infantry Regiment in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and earned the senior parachutist badge after making 50 jumps.
He worked for many news organizations, including the Knoxville News Sentinel, United Press International, San Francisco Daily Commercial News and Copley News Service, where he served as a foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires; Mexico City, Mexico; and Saigon, Vietnam. He interviewed many important figures in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America, including revolutionary Che Guevara and writer Jorge Luis Borges, along with presidents Diaz Ordaz and Lopez Mateos of Mexico; Salvador Allende of Chile; Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua; Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador; and Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay. He interviewed noteworthy Americans visiting Latin America including Robert Kennedy, presidents Nixon and Johnson, Gov. Edmund Brown, and actor John Wayne, writer Benjamin Spock and astronaut Wally Schirra.
In his later years he became a university professor, teaching journalism at several campuses in the California State University system, as well as at Mary Washington University in Virginia, and Bentley University and Emerson College in Massachusetts.
He is survived by his wife, Mary Thompson-Jones; three children, Andrea Williams, Gareth Jones and Gwyneth Jones; son-in-law Sean Williams; grandchildren Colin and Elinor; cousins Sharon, Rachel, Jennifer and Muriel; parents-in-law, Chet and Mary Thompson; and brothers-in-law Chet and Colin.
Services were held on March 21 at Sullivan Funeral Home in Hanover, Massachusetts.