Doris Jones, 85, brightened lives with greeting cards

By RALPH ELLIS

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Doris Jones never met a greeting card she didn’t like.

She mailed cards to friends and family on the regular holidays, of course, but often put one in the mail for those moments not marked on a calendar. Since Mrs. Jones bought by the box and regularly visited the Hallmark shop, she had a range of cards to express every sentiment. Get well. Don’t give up. Thinking of you.

Sometimes she even reached out to strangers. Roger Jones remembers the time his mother read a story in The Atlanta Journal about some folks facing a problem in life.

“She said, ‘I need to send them a card,’ ” Mr. Jones said. His mother got on the telephone and called the newspaper and somehow dug up an address. Soon Doris Jones had touched another life through the U.S. Mail.

Doris Joyner Jones, 85, of Stone Mountain died Wednesday of cancer. Her funeral will be at 2 p.m. Saturday in the chapel of A.S. Turner and Sons. Friends can visit the family at the funeral home from noon until the service.

Mrs. Jones grew up in Millen in south Georgia, where she met her husband, the late Roger Jones Sr. The couple moved to the Belvedere Park section of DeKalb County, near Memorial Drive, and raised two sons: Roger, who now lives in Covington, and Tim, a resident of Lawrenceville.

Mrs. Jones was always a homemaker and never learned to drive until her 40s. When Roger Jones entered the military in the late 1960s, he left his royal blue 1966 Ford Mustang behind. Soon the young man’s car belonged to Doris Jones.

“She loved that car to death,” Roger Jones said. “She thought that was the grandest thing, that she had so much freedom.”

She worked outside the house only once and briefly, at a Hallmark store. She shopped there so much she and the owner became friends.

Sometime in the last few decades, Mrs. Jones’s love of greeting cards evolved into something resembling a personal ministry, her sons say. The recipients were usually people in the neighborhood and church.

“It didn’t have to be a special occasion,” said Tim Jones. “If somebody said, ‘I have a friend who had something happen in their life,’ she’d get their address and send cards to them.”

The downside?

“It used to drive my father crazy because she spent so much money on cards,” Roger Jones said.

Mrs. Jones didn’t let health problems stop her. After she broke her leg and was bedridden, Mrs. Jones dispatched family members to purchase cards. Caregivers stopped off at the card shop with her on the way home from radiation treatment.

Tim Jones saw the results of his mother’s love of cards last February, when his father died.

“What goes around comes around,” Mr. Jones said. “She got a lot of cards. All the people she blessed in her life tried to bless her back.”

Other survivors include seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.