Giving $5M in two years, philanthropist adopts Utah Valley
Barbara Barrington Jones stands for a portrait at Thanksgiving Point Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Barrington Jones has recently made very generous donations, millions of dollars, to UVU and Thanksgiving Point.
Barbara Barrington Jones stands for a portrait at Thanksgiving Point Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Barrington Jones has recently made very generous donations, millions of dollars, to UVU and Thanksgiving Point. MARK JOHNSTON/Daily Herald
After moving here just two years ago, Barbara Barrington Jones has adopted Utah County in a big way.
Thanksgiving Point announced this week that Jones’s family foundation had given the last $3 million needed to launch construction of the Museum of Natural Curiosity, ending seven years of fundraising. She also gave $2 million to Wee Care at UVU, providing childcare for student mothers.
But if you think Jones was born with a silver spoon, think again.
Her story begins in Texas, where she grew up near the Mexican border. Her passion was ballet, and after the last day of high school, she went to New York City.
“I was a starving student,” she said with a laugh. “I lived in a convent in the Bronx.”
She got a job dancing for the New York City Ballet, working for two years before joining the Georgia Ballet. Then she married her first husband, who was horribly abusive, she said.
“Three times he literally had a gun at my head,” she said. She was teaching ballet at the University of Texas one day when her husband pulled her out of a performance.
“He taped my ankles and my wrists and put a sawed-off shotgun to my head,” she said. He told her he was going to maim her legs so she could never dance again.
“Those were horrible, horrible years,” she said, weeping.
And then one day, after they had been married for 12 years, her husband put a .44 Magnum to her head and threatened to kill her. Then he left the house and shot himself. Jones was 29 years old, with a 4-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son.
Her husband’s suicide was a kind of gift, she said, because she would never have been able to leave the relationship on her own.
“You wonder, what will I do, where will I go, how will I feed my children,” she said, noting that every abused woman feels the same way.
Her husband was dangerously mentally ill.
“No one had a label for manic depression in those days,” she said. “He was a great guy when you knew him. He was a manager for the Monroe Calculating Machine Company. He was a very smart man. I just remember thinking, after living through one of those episodes with the gun, that I had just lived through sheer terror.”
For two years she was a single mother. She discovered a yen for business, opening two Barbizon modeling schools. One day, she stepped into an elevator wearing a yellow hat with a long feather, a yellow coat dress, and matching shoes, gloves, and purse — and a walking stick, as a fashion accessory. A man towering over her in the elevator said, “You are from Texas.”
“How did you know that?” Jones responded.
“You look like the yellow rose of Texas,” said the man. And he invited Jones and eight of her friends to lunch. And then to dinner, even though he was a quarter-century older than any of them. Her friends went, but Jones didn’t. She had a job modeling a face cream demonstration. The man, California business mogul Harold R. Jones, came to find her. He put his hand on her face and “it was instant chemistry,” she said. “It was the neatest feeling I’ve had in my whole life.”
The two “courted” for two years, flying between Texas and California. In 1974, they married.
Both were Catholic, but had become disenfranchised. Hal, as he was called, asked his wife “to go find us a new church.”
Not long after, the couple came to Utah on a hiking vacation.
“We didn’t know where we were. What is Salt Lake?” she said, laughing. Her husband pointed to the Salt Lake Temple and said, “Would you like to go inside?” They went to Temple Square and were shocked to be told they couldn’t get in the temple.
But in the visitor’s center, Jones felt something and began to cry. She remembered that for years she had been praying. “Jesus Christ, where are you? Who are you?” Now, she felt an answer.
Her husband wasn’t convinced. “I will never join a church where you have to sit for three hours,” she remembers him saying.
But after three years, and 10 pairs of missionaries, the entire family was baptized.
Her husband died a decade ago; the couple had been married 30 years. A year after his death, one of the 13 companies he’d owned was sold for $120 million. He had started out selling “watered-down lemonade” at a stadium in California as a 10-year-old boy, one of five children in a deeply impoverished family. He had saved enough to buy a cement mixer, selling stepping stones for a 15 cent profit. He started a construction company, and grew it into a major firm, building roads and bridges and buildings.
Jones, meanwhile — channeling her abusive first marriage — wanted to help women. She began writing books and became a motivational speaker. She has run a camp for women for 18 years and has lectured all around the world — Africa, South America, Korea and Australia.
Two years ago, she felt compelled to move to Utah. During a visit to Thanksgiving Point’s tulip festival, she fell in love with the beauty of the area. She moved her camps for women and underprivileged youth to Thanksgiving Point, and then moved her foundation into offices on the second floor of the dinosaur museum. When Thanksgiving Point asked her to make the final donation needed to begin construction on the Museum of Natural Curiosity, she said yes.
To Jones, the donation is part of the fulfillment of her husband’s wishes. Knowing he was dying, he said to her, “I’m leaving to you what I have sacrificed a whole lifetime to build because I know you will make a difference with it.” Her foundation also supports an orphanage in Cambodia and another in China, among myriad other philanthropic works.
The new museum will be a rare opportunity for families to come together away from television and the Internet, to explore the natural world while strengthening the family bond, she said.
“Barbara is a great friend and really loves what we do at Thanksgiving Point,” said Mike Washburn, CEO and president of the museum. Thanksgiving Point is grateful for her donation and excited that her family will surround her at the ground breaking on Monday.
“I just know my husband is smiling down, happy to help thousands of families,” Jones said with tears in her eyes.
