Remembering Landon Y. Jones ’66, Editor, Author, and Inveterate ‘Ripper’

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The cover of the program at Lanny Jones ’66’s memorial service at the University Chapel.

Christopher Connell ’71

There was an ironclad rule in the newspaper-and-magazine-filled Princeton study of writer and editor Landon Y. Jones ’66: None could be discarded until Lanny had scrawled his initials at the top, signifying he had plumbed them for ideas for his own writing and those who wrote for him at the Princeton Alumni Weekly and People magazine.

“He never boarded a plane or train without a totally ridiculous volume of magazines and newspapers, two soft-sided leather briefcases bursting at the seams,” son Landon Jones III ’97 told 400 friends and family who gathered at the Nov. 15 memorial service for his father at the Princeton University Chapel. “Most distinctive of all was the sound of him tearing up clips. Car service drivers would call him ‘the Ripper.’”

Jones popularized the term “baby boomer” in his first book, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. He became a writer for Time after college, edited PAW in his mid-20s, then returned to the Luce empire and later edited Money and People magazines, where he regularly put Princess Diana on the cover.

But he also commissioned stories about writers, poets, “and small-town Americans who had done something exceptional,” said novelist and professor of English Joyce Carol Oates — one of seven speakers at the memorial service —who credited Lanny and Sarah Jones with folding her and her husband into Princeton’s intellectual community upon their arrival in 1978.

Lanny never really left Princeton after arriving from St. Louis in 1962. He’d take the morning train from Princeton Junction to his duties in Manhattan and race to Penn Station at the end of the day to get back to his wife and three children. He collected Princeton reunion yearbooks, not just his own, displaying on a 10-foot shelf volumes from the Class of 1897’s 15^th reunion to the Class of 1970’s 50^th.

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Jones, who died Aug. 17, edited magazines including People, Money, and PAW

He wrote a biography of explorer William Clark as well as “Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved Into a Culture of Fans and Followers, completed in 2023 despite several years of ill health. Until days before his death in August from myelofibrosis, he was gathering string for his next project, a book on the impact of F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 and other midwesterners on American life.

He mentored journalists, advanced the careers of women at Time, and kept myriad close acquaintances who considered him their best friend.

“He was the most connected guy I’ve ever known,” said Jim Merritt ’66, one of his successors as PAW editor.

Jones overcame childhood hearing loss by learning how to read lips, and he always “paid close attention to what people said,” fellow St. Louisan Mike Witte ’66 noted.

Oates, in her remarks, said: “He loved to laugh and his laugh was contagious. He saw the absurdity of much of American life.” Jones was 80.