Clifford A. Jones | |
---|---|
20th Lieutenant Governor of Nevada | |
In office January 1947 – December 1954 |
|
Governor | Charles H. Russell |
Preceded by | Vail M. Pittman |
Succeeded by | Rex Bell |
Member of the Nevada State Assembly | |
Personal details | |
Born |
Long Lane, Missouri |
February 19, 1912
Died | November 16, 2001 Las Vegas, Nevada |
(aged 89)
Political party | Democratic |
Clifford Aaron Jones, Sr. (February 19, 1912 – November 16, 2001) was an American politician. He was the 20th Lieutenant Governor of Nevada from January 1947 to December 1954.
Clifford A. Jones' was also the founder of the Jones, Jones Close & Brown branch of the one of Nevada's legendary law firms, today known as Jones Vargas.
Cliff Jones was born in Long Lane, Missouri. His family moved to Las Vegas in 1931 while Cliff was in college at the University of Missouri. When they weren’t attending school, both Cliff and his younger brother, Herbert M. Jones, worked on the construction of Boulder Dam in the 1930s, working their way up from servers at the Anderson mess hall to various jobs including mucker, puddler, signalman, crane operator and power hose operator.
While an undergraduate, Cliff took classes at the University of Missouri School of Law, with the result that Cliff had accumulated three years of law school credits before he actually graduated from law school. This qualified Cliff to sit for the Nevada bar exam during his final semester of law school. Consequently, in the winter of 1937, Cliff traveled from Columbia, Missouri to Carson City and took the exam. He was notified later that semester that he had passed.
Cliff returned to law school and completed his studies and graduated in the spring of 1938. He returned home to Las Vegas and was sworn in as an attorney, one of only five newly admitted attorneys in Nevada that year. He immediately entered private practice.
During the years before World War II, Cliff entered Nevada politics. In the 1940 election, he was elected to the Nevada Assembly and become its majority leader and chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
During World War II, Cliff was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army. He served in the European theater, in the Third and Ninth Armies, earning four battle stars and a Bronze Star Medal with an oak leaf cluster. By the war's end, he was discharged as a lieutenant colonel.