GREENFIELD — Irmarie Jones, a Greenfield Recorder reporter and columnist for 43 years who chronicled the stories of thousands of her “just plain neighbors,” died in the early morning hours Wednesday. She was 97.
Known as a highly energetic woman who volunteered for dozens of community organizations and embraced the lives of Franklin County residents as if they were part of her own extended family, Jones was among the first recipients of the Recorder’s Citizen of the Year award.
“You’d never hear Irmarie saying anything bad about anybody,” said Maggie Haigis, a longtime friend who was part of a female reporters group that met for monthly luncheons. “She just didn’t think that way. She was truly a person who liked everybody, and that was very special about her.”
Jones was “always on the move,” Haigis recalled. “She was just always doing for others, with intense energy. She’d never forget a birthday or details of everyone’s family.”
Added Haigis’ sister, Ann Banash: “Irmarie was a force of nature. Everywhere she went, she knew practically everyone, and they all knew her and all counted her as a friend and certainly as a neighbor.”
“The term sui generis applies to Irmarie so well,” commented longtime friend Mary Siano. “I remember receiving her phone calls — she never identified herself, of course, and was always full of nearly breathless questions. Her energy and enthusiasm were legendary. An end of an era, I think.”
Jones began her career as a reporter for the Greenfield Recorder in February 1969, after three years of working as a substitute teacher in Greenfield’s public schools.
“I always wanted to be a reporter,” she recalled years after retiring to her twice-weekly human interest column. “So on my 45th birthday, I got my start.” She covered education and human services before being asked by then-managing editor Bob Dolan to start her Just Plain Neighbors column in 1977.
“‘Friday will be your last day as a reporter,’ he told me, and I wondered if I had been fired,” Jones wrote in a 2002 column. “‘However, beginning Monday, you will write a human interest column.’ … That was it. I stopped reporting on education and human services, a beat that I loved.”
Buckland librarian Jane Buchanan, who grew up with the Jones family in Greenfield, said, “It feels like such a loss, not just for those who knew her, but for the community. Her column was a source for building community connections for so many years. She gave value in print to the little things and to people whose achievements might otherwise have gone unacknowledged. I knew Irm all my life. She was a unique presence, that’s for sure. Her laugh, her zest for life, and her compassion are the things that will stay with me.”
Longtime friend Sandy Thomas called Jones “a powerhouse of everything good in a soul. Her positive energy and enthusiasm for life were evident in every encounter. Irmarie was curious about you and your neighbor in the best of ways, penning compelling stories for her readers as she dashed about. … Irmarie’s bright light blessed us all in Franklin County.”
Denny Wilkins, a former Recorder editor who met Jones soon after arriving at the newspaper in 1970, recalled that her phone was “was rarely idle.”
“She did more than simply answer the phone and take down the details for the item for a column,” he said. “Irmarie chatted with people, often gesticulating with her hands to the wonderment of the rest of us in the newsroom. She knew more people in Franklin County by name than all the reporters and editors combined.”
Wilkins edited her Just Plain Neighbors column for about a decade. “I realized what Irmarie wrote, and how she wrote it, carried the right tone, the right voice, to the people of Franklin County who depended on her to find out when the local garden clubs would meet,” he said. “Irmarie taught me something important. Regular readers of Just Plain Neighbors would see names — plenty of local names. At a newspaper in a rural county, names are news. Irmarie knew that.”
Although she retired in 1990, Jones continued writing her column twice a week until 2012, adjusting along the way to increasingly complex computer technology.
Jones, a University of Massachusetts graduate, first immersed herself in the Greenfield community as a copy writer and children’s program announcer for WHAI. She married Wallace A. (Brud) Jones of Greenfield in 1947. He predeceased her in 2007.
They lived until 1950 in Amherst, where he continued his studies at UMass and she worked as children’s librarian at Jones Library. They bought a farm in Buckland, where she was a library trustee, a member of Mary Lyon Church and an active member of the Crittenden School Parent-Teacher Association.
The family moved to Greenfield in 1956, and except for 1958 to 1961, when they lived in Leverett, she lived the rest of her life in Greenfield.
Born Feb. 26, 1924 in Erie, Pennsylvania, as Irma Marie Scheuneman to Walter A. and Emma (Rahm) Scheuneman, she spent her early years in Pittsburgh. She moved to Leominster in 1939, graduating from Leominster High School in 1941 and from Massachusetts State College four years later.
Community involvement was central to Jones, even as she raised seven children — including two foster daughters she later adopted. She was a Peace Corps representative beginning in 1962, and during that decade was also an active member of the Greenfield UNICEF Committee and the Greenfield Community Peace Center, actively protesting the Vietnam War. She chaired the George W. Davenport Fund, which gives money to elderly people in need, and was twice elected a trustee of the Jenny Bascom Fund.
She was also a member of All Souls Church and twice chair of its trustees; was an incorporator of the Friends of the Greenfield Public Library and its president for six years, and a library trustee for two terms; was a volunteer at the Franklin Area Survival Center and president of its board of directors for several years; and volunteered at Greenfield Community College’s Pioneer Valley Institute at the Greenfield Visitors Center.
Her family joined her and Brud in support of the local immigrant community by creating a yearly GCC scholarship, the Brud and Irmarie Scholarship for international students and those learning English as a second language.
In August 2004, a bench at Greenfield’s Energy Park was dedicated to her and Brud.
Jones’ worlds of the Recorder and active civic involvement came together when she was chosen as the 1993 Citizen of the Year. At the time, she was asked whether she wouldn’t rather have some time to relax.
“I guess it’s just not my nature,” she said at the time. “It goes way back to junior high and high school. I was editor of my school paper and in all kinds of clubs in high school. At Mass State, I almost flunked out in the first semester of my junior year because I was in so many activities. I just can’t explain it. It’s just the way I am.”
Richie Davis was a writer and editor for more than 40 years at the Recorder. On his relationship with Jones, he says, “I met Irmarie when I joined the Recorder staff in 1976. She became one of my dearest, most lasting friends, and I’ve treasured her. Irmarie was the absolute kindest, most involved and most loving human being I’ve ever met, and I cherished visiting her regularly after her retirement. She epitomized community.”