Dick Jones

Richard Percy Jones (February 25, 1927 – July 7, 2014), known as Dick Jones or Dickie Jones, was an American actor who achieved some success as a child actor and as a young adult, especially in B-Westerns and television. In 1938 he played Artimer "Artie" Peters, nephew of Buck Peters in the Hopalong Cassidy movie The Frontiersman. He may be best-known as the voice of Pinocchio in the 1940 Walt Disney film Pinocchio.

Jones was born in 1927 in Snyder, Texas, some ninety miles south of Lubbock, Texas. The son of a newspaper editor, Jones was a prodigious horseman from infancy, having been billed at the age of four as the "World's Youngest Trick Rider and Trick Roper". At the age of six, he was hired to perform riding and lariat tricks in the rodeo owned by western star Hoot Gibson, who convinced young Jones and his parents there was a place for him in Hollywood. Jones and his mother moved there. Gibson arranged for some small parts for the boy, whose good looks, energy and pleasant voice quickly landed him more and bigger parts, both in low-budget Westerns and in more substantial productions.

Career

Among his early film roles are Little Men (1934) and A Man to Remember (1938). Jones appeared as a bit player in several of Hal Roach's Our Gang (Little Rascals) shorts. In 1939, Dickie Jones appeared as a troublesome kid named 'Killer Parkins' in the film Nancy Drew... Reporter. In the film he did a good imitation of Donald Duck. The same year he appeared with Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as Senate page Richard (Dick) Jones. In 1940, he had one of his most prominent (though invisible) roles, as the voice of Pinocchio in Disney's animated film of the same name. Jones attended Hollywood High School and at fifteen took over the role of Henry Aldrich on the hit radio show The Aldrich Family. He learned carpentry and augmented his income with jobs in that field. He served in the Army in Alaska during the final months of World War II.[citation needed]

Gene Autry, who before the war had cast Jones in several westerns, put him back to work in films and particularly in television, on programs produced by Autry's company Flying A Pictures. Jones guest-starred regularly on The Gene Autry Show in the early 1950s. He appeared in a 1950 episode of the TV series The Lone Ranger titled "Man Without a Gun". In 1950, he played the 16-year-old cook for a small Confederate Army unit in Rocky Mountain. By this time he was billed as Dick Jones, and starred as Dick West, sidekick to the Western hero known as The Range Rider, played by Jock Mahoney, in a television series that ran for seventy-six episodes in syndication, beginning in 1951.[citation needed]

Jones was cast thereafter in 1954 and 1955 in four episodes of Annie Oakley. Autry gave Jones his own series, Buffalo Bill, Jr. (1955), which ran for forty-two episodes in syndication. Through his work in Western feature films and Western TV series from the 1930s through the 1950s, Jones became a fixture at the Iverson Movie Ranch, considered the most heavily filmed outdoor shooting location in Hollywood history. In 1957, Jones appeared twice as Ned in the episodes "The Brothers" and "Renegade Rangers" of the syndicated American Civil War series Gray Ghost, with Tod Andrews in the title role of Confederate Major John Singleton Mosby.

In 1958, during the filming of the The Cool and the Crazy, he and fellow actor Richard Bakalyan were arrested for vagrancy in Kansas City, Missouri. They were standing on the corner between takes in "juvenile delinquent" outfits and the police thought that they were actual gang members. It took several hours for the film crew to remedy the misunderstanding and to get Jones and Bakalyan out of jail.[citation needed]

In 1960, he guest-starred as Bliss in the episode "Fire Flight" of another syndicated series, The Blue Angels, about the elite air-show squadron of the United States Navy. About this time, he was cast in Grant Sullivan's syndicated western series, Pony Express. In 1962, Jones portrayed John Hunter in the episode "The Wagon Train Mutiny" of NBC's long-running western series Wagon Train starring John McIntire. That same year, he appeared in the television short The Night Rider starring Johnny Cash as Johnny Laredo and Eddie Dean as Trail Boss Tim. Jones' last acting role was as Cliff Fletcher in the 1965 film Requiem for a Gunfighter.

Honors

In 2000, Dick Jones was named one of the Disney Legends. In early 2009, Jones did promotional events for the Platinum Edition DVD and Blu-ray release of Pinocchio. In March 2009, he was a guest star at the Williamsburg Film Festival.

Death

Jones died after a fall at his home on July 7, 2014 at the age of 87.

Selected filmography

• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
• Pinocchio (1940 film) (1940)
• Angel on the Amazon (1948)
• Sons of New Mexico (1949)
• Wagon Team (1952)
• Last of the Pony Riders (1953)
• The Cool and the Crazy (1958)
• Requiem for a Gunfighter (1965)