Chip Jones is the author of the new book, “The Organ Thieves.”
Few writers have covered Virginia more extensively than veteran journalist Chip Jones, who spent 30 years as a newspaper reporter or magazine editor for outlets like the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Roanoke Times, Virginia Business magazine, and others. Jones has also authored three books of military history, starting with Boys of ’67: From Vietnam to Iraq, the Extraordinary Story of a Few Good Men, which was five years in the making. As a reporter, he was part of a team of journalists covering the contentious strike of the United Mine Workers of America in 1989 against Pittston Coal, and his writing resulted in him being part of a team named as a 1990 Pulitzer Prize finalist in General News.
Jones lives near Richmond with his wife of 45 years, Deborah White Jones, a singer-songwriter and a former English as Second Language and Special Education teacher. The couple has three adult children. His new book The Organ Thieves (Simon & Schuster, $28) is out August 17.
Chip, you are the quintessential Virginia journalist who has chronicled much of Virginia’s history and way of life, from coal mining to the tobacco industry. What makes Virginia so interesting for a writer?
It’s an amazing place, isn’t it? As the son of a Marine, I spent my early childhood wandering – often alone! – through the woods of Quantico above the Potomac River. We then moved up river just south of Alexandria, so I enjoyed the suburban growth in the 1960s before it turned into the gridlocked place it is today. It was there I met my high school sweetheart, Deborah White, before we headed west to study at the University of Kansas.
After our college days on the Great Plains, we both missed the blue mountains of Virginia. I was fortunate to land a reporting job at the now-defunct Blacksburg Sun, where Debbie and I rented a farmhouse for $125 a month! We were near Prices Fork Road, and were able to enjoy one of Virginia’s best and most affordable summer pastimes: tubing and canoeing on the New River. Later, when I worked for the Roanoke Times, I was able to take a two-week-long canoe trip with a great photographer, Gene Dalton. We traversed the entire New River in Virginia – from Independence to Narrows – camping along the way and meeting lots of friendly people. Every time I hear “Green River” by Creedence Clearwater Revival I think of that summer sojourn!
I also lived in Charlottesville, working at the Daily Progress, where my first child was born, before moving to Roanoke where Debbie had our other two children. When I was offered a job as an editor at Virginia Business, we moved to a part of Virginia I never expected to live: Richmond. After all of our time in Roanoke and Blacksburg, it didn’t take long before Debbie asked sadly, “Where are the mountains?” Still, we found Richmond had a richness and diversity we hadn’t found elsewhere. We also found a church home at St. Matthias Episcopal Church.
Looking back on our many friends, teachers, and professional colleagues we’d gotten to know around the state, I’m reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about living and writing in Paris: A Moveable Feast. Virginia, for me, has offered its own kind of moveable – and often moving – feast. And it’s definitely given me plenty to write and think about.
You have written much about the military, such as in your book Boys of ‘67: From Vietnam to Iraq. What sparked your passion for this subject?
My late father, William K. Jones, was a hero in America’s fight for survival in World War II. Like many WWII vets, Dad didn’t talk much about being a Marine officer who led his men into withering fire and hand-to-hand combat in the war with Japan. But every so often he would open up about what it felt like to be pinned down on Betio Island at Tarawa, as the tide behind him turned red with the blood of his fellow Marines, or to be attacked by enemy tanks rushing out of the jungle on Saipan. I should add that my late mother, Charlotte, was an unsung hero of the war. She lost her first husband and, like so many brave American women, was left widowed in her early twenties with a little girl, my sister Carol, to raise. My parents married after the war and had three more children (I was the fourth and last, and no doubt have all the personality traits of the baby of the family.)
My first book – Boys of ’67 – tells more about my service-oriented family, including my brother Bill, a decorated Marine platoon leader in Vietnam and our first cousin, Gen. James L. Jones, who became the 32nd Commandant of the Marine Corps, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and NATO Commander. After he retired from active military service, Jim served as National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama. Jim lived with us during his senior year in 1961-62 at the now defunct Groveton High School in Fairfax County.
What was your most challenging work so far?
Searching for the many missing pieces of the puzzle of law, medicine and history that went into writing The Organ Thieves. The story reaches a climax during a trial in 1972 and, much to my dismay, I learned that no transcript of the weeklong proceedings had survived. Finding other ways to describe the witnesses and their riveting testimony was key – such as using the hand-written notes of the trial judge, A. Christian Compton, which I found in the archives of the law library at Washington and Lee University in Lexington.
Virginia has changed a lot in recent years, including the way we see it from a journalistic point of view. What’s your take on these changes?
It feels like a tectonic shift in what for too long has passed for the official history of “the Old Dominion.” In Richmond, I’m seeing, hearing and feeling a search for a more enlightened “New Dominion” – one that rejects the old Jim Crow myths and images and, looking forward, seeks to end anything that still hinders equal employment, housing, policing, and health care.
Your new book The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant deals with a controversial topic, the 19th-century practice of body-snatching Black Americans. What ignited your interest in this topic?
At first I was exploring the events and people involved in the first heart transplant in Virginia performed in 1968 at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. But as I learned more about this epic story, I became increasingly curious about the fate of the Black man – Bruce Tucker – whose body was used in the operation. Tucker’s heart was removed and transplanted into the chest of an ailing white businessman. All of this happened before anyone in his family had been notified even though his brother, William, owned a nearby shoe repair business. Adding to the family’s grief and shock, they learned later from their local undertaker that Bruce’s kidneys also had been extracted. The official story from the hospital was that Bruce Tucker had died from a severe head injury suffered in a fall less than a day before the decision was made to remove his vital organs. My three-year-long investigation led me to explore the roots of systemic racism in the entire American medical system, where the 19th-century practices of body-snatching and grave-robbing were the gruesome methods used to steal corpses used in the early days of medical schools from Harvard to Columbia to the Medical College of Virginia. In Charlottesville, the University of Virginia School of Medicine also employed grave robbers, known as “resurrectionists” who generally preyed on cemeteries of enslaved people. At MCV, I was shocked to learn that this brutal practice continued well into the 1890s, not long before my own father was born!
What do you want to write about next?
My next nonfiction work is yet to be determined. But among my many great experiences living in Virginia was studying creative writing at Hollins College (now University) in Roanoke with the great writers and scholars Richard Dillard and Jeanne Larsen. I think it’s about time I finished my novel about growing up on a Marine base in the high desert of California in 1965.
