A Monroeville World War II veteran who knew famous novelists Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote as children has died.

George T. Jones, 102, died on Thursday morning, Feb. 27, at Monroeville County Hospital, his son, Lucian Jones, confirmed.

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 retired at 72 after running Central Supply Company in Monroeville for decades. He then lived at 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.

“For the Monroeville area, a bright light in the community has gone out,” said Lee Peacock, a radio host on WPPG 101.1 FM, a former next-door neighbor of Jones who also writes for the Monroe Journal.

For the past three decades, Jones had been a writer and kept busy as probably the oldest newspaper columnist in the state, if not the nation. For the past 29 years, he had 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.”

His column appeared weekly and he continued to write new columns, Lucian Jones said. “He never stopped, 29 years solid, every week, except when he was sick or didn’t feel good, they’d run an old story,” said Lucian.

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 was tech-savvy enough to email his column to the Monroe Journal every week.

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.

Jones 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 in an interview on his 101st birthday. “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.”

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 in the interview with AL.com on his 101st birthday. They played together on the unit’s recreational football team, Jones said. “He was the quarterback and I was the split end,” he said.

Van Hoose retired from the newspaper in 1990 after 43 years as a sportswriter for The Birmingham News and died in 1997.

Lucian Jones wrote a biography of his father called “100 Years a Patriot” that was published in time for his father’s 100th birthday in 2022.

Jones’ life story includes teen memories of Capote, who wrote “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” two decades later. “I ran him out of the drugstore when I was 15 and he was 13,” Jones recalled.

Jones said it happened in July, probably 1938, when Capote came to Monroeville to visit. Jones was working behind the counter as a soda jerk at the drugstore. Capote came in, sat on a stool and said, “‘I sure would like to have something good, but you ain’t got it.’ I made the mistake of telling him I could fix him anything he wanted. He said, ‘All right, fix me a Broadway flip.’ He’d been in New York, you know. I hadn’t a clue what it was. It kind of ticked me off, I thought he was trying to put me down. So, I leaned over the counter and I said, ‘Boy, you get smart with me and I’ll flip you right off that stool.’ He spun around, hit the floor and checked out of the drug store.”

On his 100th birthday on Oct. 11, 2022, Monroeville threw a big party for Jones at the Monroe County Museum, where the research room is named for him.

“When an old person dies, I’ve heard it said an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge has vanished; with him, it would be a library,” Peacock said. “He was one of the few remaining World War II service members.”