Early Life
Jones was born in San Saba, Texas. His mother, Lucille Marie (née Scott), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his father, Clyde C. Jones, was an oil field worker. The two were married and divorced twice. Jones has stated that his grandmother was of Cherokee ancestry. He was raised in Midland, Texas, and attended Robert E. Lee High School.
Jones graduated from the St. Mark's School of Texas, where he attended on scholarship and is now on the board of directors, and attended Harvard College on a need-based scholarship. He stayed in Mower B-12 as a freshman, across the hall from future Vice President Al Gore, the son of Sen. Albert Gore, Sr. of Tennessee. As an upperclassman, he was roommates in Dunster House with Gore and Bob Somerby, who later became editor of the media criticism site the Daily Howler. Jones played offensive guard on Harvard's undefeated 1968 varsity football team, was nominated as a first-team All-Ivy League selection, and played in the 1968 Game, which featured a memorable and literally last-minute Harvard 16-point comeback to tie Yale. He recounts his memory of "the most famous football game in Ivy League history" in the documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. Jones graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1969, and his senior thesis was on "the mechanics of Catholicism" in the works of Flannery O'Connor.
Read more about this topic: Tommy Lee Jones
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.”
—Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)