William Jones Dies at 91; Was a Passionate Sailor

William Johnstone Jones, engineer, passionate sailor, fisherman, husband, father and grandfather died Feb. 8.

He was born in 1915 in New York city to West Indian immigrant parents. In high school, he and his brothers became interested in electronics and became licensed ham radio operators. He and his identical twin, Cyril, graduated from Stuyvesant High School and were admitted to Tufts University. William entered the engineering school, though the dean warned him that because he was black, neither he nor the school would try to help him in job placement after graduation.

In their freshman year, their father was killed in a traffic accident and their scholarship aid lost due to a stock market recession. From then on the twins had to work to pay for their college costs, and in fact held a full-time job by pretending to be one person. In the summer they worked in the merchant marine.

After graduation, William applied to 48 engineering jobs, but was refused all of them, often being told that, "We don't hire (black people)."

William persisted and received certification from the U.S. Civil Service as an engineer. Because of his high school interest in electronics and radio, he got a job on Dec. 1, 1941 in systems engineering at Fort Hancock, N.J. with a group that was working on radar. He was soon selected to become the liaison between the Signal Corps and the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From that position, he became a member of an ad hoc committee of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, working on radar, communications and other technical issues.

Near the end of the war he was posted to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico and assigned to work on a problem with a number of captured German V-2 missiles. When fired, the missiles would explode as they rose out of the desert valley. He solved the mystery by proving that the problem was being caused by radio interference propagated from across the country by an atmospheric layer on the channel that had been chosen for the safety destruct signal.

After the war, William moved to work at Fort Monmouth, N.J, and received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering.

Unfortunately, during the McCarthy era, he was framed as having communist sympathies, lost his security clearance, and was fired. Moving his family to the attic of his mother's house in Harlem, he did the detective work and proved he had been framed.

Regaining his security clearance in 1952, he moved to Massachusetts for a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Lab, doing research in submarine detection with airborne radar, including work in B-29s and blimps.

In 1958, he was hired by Harvard as the chief electrical engineer for a new, joint MIT/Harvard research project, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, an "atom smasher." He also became a lecturer in Harvard's Physics Department for eight years and held an appointment as a research affiliate in the MIT Physics Department. In 1970, he was appointed as a trustee of Southern Massachusetts University (now part of the University of Massachusetts) by Gov. Francis Sargent. He served as trustee for 10 years.

In 1973, he left Harvard to join the MIT Energy Lab. During his time there he traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Europe and the Far East on energy projects for the U.S. government. He co-wrote the book Energy, Ecology and the Environment with Richard Wilson.

In 1982, William retired from MIT, but maintained his ties to the institute, holding an appointment as a research affiliate up to the time of his death. In 1983, Gov. Michael Dukakis appointed him an associate commissioner of the Metropolitan District Commission.

He and his wife, Dorothy, spent summers at their house on Martha's Vineyard, where he pursued his love of fishing, sailing (constantly buying, trying and then trading sailboats) and taking his grandchildren lobstering. When his wife entered the Windemere nursing home on the Island, he moved to the Vineyard full time, visiting his wife three times a day for five years to feed her.

He remained active and independent until a few months before his death at 91, sailing, swimming and fishing with his family.

Survivors include three sons, Peter and Marc of Massachusetts and Geoffrey of Vermont, and five grandchildren.