A Monroeville World War II veteran who knew famous novelists Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote as children turned 101 on Wednesday, Oct. 11.

George Thomas Jones fought under Gen. George S. Patton in the Third Army during World War II and was in the Battle of the Bulge.

The former businessman, who retired at 72 after running Central Supply Company in Monroeville for decades, lives in The Meadows, the same assisted living facility where Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” lived at the time of her death in 2016.

“I feel about like I did yesterday,” Jones said in a phone interview on his birthday. “I’m no spring chicken. Man, I can’t complain. I’d be an idiot.”

On Wednesday afternoon, his daughter Martha Moorer brought him a pie for his birthday. “It’s egg custard, his favorite,” she said.

For the past three decades, Jones has been a writer too and keeps busy as probably the oldest newspaper columnist in the state, if not the nation. For the past 29 years, he has written a weekly column on the history of Monroe County for the Monroe Journal, many of them collected into his books, “Happenings in Old Monroeville, Volume I and Volume II.”

He once wrote a column in 1999 about the famous novelist that bothered Harper Lee so much she didn’t talk to Jones for the rest of her life. He called her “queen of the tomboys” and recalled how in the mid-1930s at Monroeville Elementary School, when he was in sixth grade and she was in third grade, a fifth-grade bully came up behind her during a game of dodgeball and pulled her hair, then did it again.

On the third try, Lee punched him in the stomach, Jones recalled. The bully retreated, but came back later with two friends. Jones said he and other boys were ready to step in and help her, but Lee quickly fended off an attack by the hair-puller’s friend. “She whipped him before he knew what hit him,” Jones wrote. “When the second friend charged her head-on, she neatly side-stepped and tripped him, pounding him back to the ground when he tried to get up.”

The original bully then retreated, Jones said.

She showed the column to Lee’s sister, Alice, and asked for her to pass it on to Lee in New York for permission to tell it. Lee sent it back with a one-word answer.

“All I got back was just a flat ‘no,’” he said.

He published it anyway. She never spoke to him again and held a grudge, he said.

After Lee was back in Monroeville, Jones had a friend who lived in The Meadows with her.

“Nelle approached her and said, ‘Come have lunch with me,’ and she said, ‘I’ve got a visitor,’” Jones recalled. “When Nelle saw it was me visiting, she never asked her to have lunch again.”

Lee didn’t hold a grudge against Jones’ daughter, Martha, or grandson, Matt Moorer, who was Lee’s physical therapist.

“I would pick her up and take her to physical therapy, get her something to eat, and then take her back,” Martha said. “She always wanted to go to the Dairy Queen, and never had any money. I’d buy her a hot dog and say, ‘Where do you want to go?’ She’d say, ‘Burnt Corn.’ She always wanted to go to Burnt Corn, just drive around.”

On Wednesday morning on radio station WPPG 101.1 FM, host Lee Peacock, a former next-door neighbor of Jones who also writes for the Monroe Journal, discussed Jones’ amazing life.

“He’s kind of like Forrest Gump,” Peacock said in a phone interview. “He fought at the Battle of the Bulge, was a contemporary of Harper Lee and Truman Capote. He’s something else. This guy’s 101 years old. He was in his early twenties when he was in World War II.”

Peacock, who did a tour of duty in the Middle East, has discussed wartime experiences with Jones.

“After I got back from a one-year tour of duty in Iraq, we were talking about PTSD, and he said, ‘You know, son, I’ve never had no PTSD. Loud noises don’t bother me and I don’t have flashbacks, but you know what, son – every night, when I go to sleep, and I dream, I fight World War II in my dreams every night. When I wake up, it don’t bother me.’”

Jones submits his weekly column by computer to the Monroe Journal. “He emails it,” Peacock said. “For a guy his age, he’s the most tech savvy guy I know.”

Although Jones has some favorite columns that recycles occasionally, he still tries to write an original column every week, Peacock said.

Jones said he has told the publisher, Bo Bolton, that it won’t hurt his feelings if he tells him he’s too old and it’s time to quit. “He won’t let me quit,” Jones said.

“He can’t hear good, health is diminishing but he’s still sharp as a tack and writing every week for the paper,” his son, Lucian Jones, said. “He remembers everything like it was yesterday. I’d really like to know if there’s anyone his age that’s still an active journalist in the country. I’d bet he’s the oldest.”

Jones took some journalism classes at a junior college after he retired in 1994 from his business, which sold janitorial supplies to schools and hospitals. Then he started writing the historical columns for the newspaper.

Jones often sleeps till about 11 a.m., doesn’t really like visitors before 2 p.m. and stays up late, his son said.

Jones was a long-time close friend of Alf Van Hoose, the former sports editor for The Birmingham News who was also a World War II veteran who fought with Jones at the Battle of the Bulge.

“He was one of my best friends from World War II on; he and I were in the same unit,” Jones said. They played together on the unit’s recreational football team, he said. “He was the quarterback and I was the split end,” he said.

After the war, they became golfing buddies, and when Van Hoose invited him to his wedding, Jones learned that Van Hoose was marrying a red-haired girl named Carolyn Eddins, who grew up in Frisco City, eight miles from Monroeville, and who for three years straight in 7th, 8th and 9th grades had beaten Jones in regional math and English competitions. “That red-haired girl always came in first and I came in second,” Jones said.

Van Hoose retired from the newspaper in 1990 after 43 years as a sportswriter for The Birmingham News and died in 1997. He was two years older than Jones. Carolyn Van Hoose died in 2009.

Lucian Jones wrote a biography of his father called “100 Years a Patriot” that was published in time for his father’s birthday last year.

It includes memories of Capote. “I ran him out of the drugstore when I was 15 and he was 13,” Jones recalled.

“Dad was a soda jerk at the drugstore in town,” Lucian Jones said. “Truman came in, sat on a stool, and Dad asked him what he wanted. Truman said, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t know how to make it,’ and then he said something he read in a magazine, and Dad said, ‘We don’t make those,’ and Truman said, ‘Oh, I’m not surprised, you probably don’t even know how to spell it.’ Dad came around the corner and Truman jumped off the stool and ran away.”

On his 100th birthday last year, Monroeville threw a big party for him at the Monroe County Museum, where the research room is named for him, Peacock said.

This year’s birthday was more low-key, with his daughter bringing custard pie to his room.

While a lot of his friends through most of his life have preceded him in death, Jones said visitors had been pouring in to see him on his 101st birthday. “It’s been really busy,” he said.

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