Island Profiles

Island Profile: Veteran paramedic crusades to make safe driving rule real

COURTESY BETTY JONES | Betty and Ben Jones in the uniforms of their Springfield, Massachusetts professional ambulance squad in the 1980s.

Tall, wiry, fit and sharp, 90-year-old Ben Jones is the kind of man who doesn’t want to tell stories about all the years he’s been getting up from dinner tables and jumping out of showers or leaving the golf course or a good party to go help Shelter Islanders in distress. All he’ll say about his many years as an emergency medical technician (EMT) and paramedic with the Shelter Island ambulance corps is he couldn’t have done it without the support of his wife Betty, a former EMT herself.

“Their life is torn apart” by their duty to answer calls, he said of his fellow first responders. “If this pager goes off, I’d be out of here. That would be true if I were sitting down for dinner or doing something important for the family,” he said during an interview in his Heights living room last week.

THE TWO-SECOND LIE

Otherwise, he’d rather talk about another mission: to convince the powers that be in Washington and state motor vehicle departments across the country to stop teaching drivers they’ll be safe from rear-end collisions if they stay two seconds behind the vehicle in front of them. In other words, if you can count two seconds from the time that the car ahead passes a signpost until you pass the same marker, you can stop without plowing into it if the traffic suddenly halts.

It’s specified in 36 state drive manuals and it’s taught in safe driver courses, he said — but it’s just not true. “A passenger car in perfect mint condition on a dry road in ideal conditions going 60 mph can’t stop in three seconds,” he said.

An active paramedic and 30-year veteran of the town’s ambulance squad, Mr. Jones is certified by the National Safety Council to teach safe ambulance driving. For that course, he’s required to teach a five-second rule: more than double what civilians are taught. That just doesn’t make sense, he said.

For 10 years or so, he’s traveled, researched and spent hours online and on the phone with people including Ray LaHood, U.S. secretary of transportation, trying to find out why civilian drivers are taught what he considers a bold-faced lie.

The so-called “two second rule” is embraced by engineers, bureaucrats, auto manufacturers and even insurance companies. Mr. Jones thinks they preach it in order to maximize the capacity of limited-access highways. That saves billions in highway expansion — if highway expansion were even an option, which it often is not. With 40 percent of fatal traffic accidents the result of rear-end collisions, the rule also generates revenues for a vast, interconnected industry that thrives on crashes, from hospitals to body shops to lawyers.

“In my mind, there is a massive, worldwide conspiracy and it’s generated by the boys right here,” he said, sitting in a living room chair and pointing with his foot at a fat set of books on the floor: the National Highway Capacity Manual produced by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. He’d recently ordered it and has been reading it through.

Only after he had put that issue on the table would Mr. Jones spend some time talking about his life, if not the details of his work as a paramedic.

NEW CAREER PATH

He and Betty jumped into it together, when he was still chairman of the board of the Monarch Insurance Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. Part-time Shelter Island residents then, they were asked at a party if any of their three grown children might be interested in volunteering for the corps. That got Mr. Jones, then in his early 60s, thinking. In a pattern of commitment, devotion and boundless energy that even a superficial biographer will spot as the common thread in any Ben Jones mission, he jumped into ambulance training head first. He certified to be an emergency medical technician — as did Betty right along with him — through a course in Springfield. Both were such good students that the instructor asked them to join the local squad, which was a paid professional corps.

For a long time, the other Monarch board members and executives had no idea Mr. Jones was moonlighting with the squad in that depressed and crime-ridden city, answering as many as 12 calls in 12 hours and never taking off his boots. He’d come back home in nearby Somers, Connecticut at 6 a.m. to take a shower and go back to his work at the office. Only when he appeared in a page-one newspaper photo giving CPR to a fire victim did his Monarch colleagues learn about his alternate career path.

Relax, he told the astonished and concerned company brass: he had only a couple of years to go until his required retirement at age 65, his extra job wasn’t interfering with his job performance at Monarch and it was none of their business what he did on his own time.

Mr. Jones started at the insurance firm as a young man fresh out of the Army after serving in Germany during the war. He would stay with Monarch for 41 years. He started as a door-to-door sales trainee in New York and New Jersey and went on to become president and chairman of the board.

Betty was a girl he’d met at the University of Idaho, where the Army had sent him in 1944 to learn engineering before sending him off to the war in Germany. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” he said. “After I left Idaho, I kept calling her” from stateside and writing her from Germany.

On leave, he married her in 1944 in Maplewood, New Jersey, his hometown. Afterward, she went back to college in Idaho and he went back to Germany. An enlisted man because of some health concern that kept him from entering officer candidate school, he had studied German at Dartmouth so the Army — despite the engineering training they’d given him — made him a translator. Sometimes he worked with prisoners of war and sometimes with local people to collect information.

SKI RESORT BERGERMEISTER

After VE Day, he was stationed with the occupation forces in a little mountain town called Oberstdorf, where the Germans had dismantled what little infrastructure had been in place there for skiers. In what sounds now a little like a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland “Hey, let’s put on a show” story, he found a warehouse full of boots, skis and poles, sought out the man who had run the rope tow, and oversaw the revival of Oberstdorf and its redevelopment.

“We set up the finest ski resort in the entire U.S. Army forces,” Mr. Jones said, declaring it was as good as Vail. He added with a tone of amazement that he became the virtual “burgermeister” of the place, making arrangements for top brass to take over a local house, with maid and butler provided, for a week or two of skiing. He was only a corporal and at the time he thought “that was kind of nuts.” So at his request, they made him a tech sergeant.

In civilian life, one of the many goals that Mr. Jones set for himself was to ski at least 30 days a year. He pulled it off for decades, in part, by volunteering for the ski patrol at Mt. Tom in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He trained for marathons just to keep in shape for skiing and, running late with company business on the day of the Shelter Island 10K, he had the company helicopter drop him off at the Island’s Klenawicus field so he could make the starting gun. He gave up skiing only when it got too cold for him but he takes pride in the excellent skiers his kids became.

Even beyond the ambulance corps, Mr. Jones has been a major player on Shelter Island. As a member of what used to be called the Shelter Island Heights Association, he and a small group of reform-minded residents led a campaign in the 1970s to buy out the man who held many shares of association stock. As Mr. Jones tells it, the man was covering the association’s operating costs and capital improvements — for the roads, sewers, water and the association-owned ferry company — by selling off land. Mr. Jones and his friends raised the cash to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse: three times the $100 that shares were going for. After taking control, Mr. Jones and friends reorganized the association as the Heights Property Owners Corporation, which under state law had to function “as a pay-as-you-go operation,” Mr. Jones explained. That meant realistic dues had to be assessed on members for the first time.

ISLAND ROOTS

The grandson of a Methodist minister who used to run camp meetings on what was once church property — it’s now Heights corporation territory — Mr. Jones and his sister Elizabeth were teenagers living in Maplewood when their father died in 1935. A lawyer, his father had seen Shelter Island as a great real estate investment and had bought a lot of land here. It fell to Ben to manage the cottage on Summerfield Place near North Ferry that his mother rented out every summer for the much needed income. He didn’t much like the work or the place. “I wanted no part of Shelter Island,” he said, because there didn’t seem to be much to do or many friendly people.

His mother, unable to pay the taxes, eventually sold her land holdings to a bank but, as part of the deal, got to keep the cottage. One year, long after Mr. Jones had landed his insurance job and was raising a family with Betty in Maplewood, his mother called, “literally in tears,” unable to find a tenant and desperate about the lost revenue.

“I said, ‘Mom, I’ll take it,’” Mr. Jones remembered. His game plan was to convince a doctor friend of his who was planning to rent on the Jersey shore to take the place. The doctor, though, was willing only to split the rental with Ben as a partner “so we came down here and never left,” Mr. Jones said of himself and his family.

Why did the place suddenly click for him? “I was in vacation mode,” he said. He had fun, enjoyed the people he met, joined the Yacht Club. From then on, he and his sister kept the place, splitting their time in it. A physician married to a physician, Drs. Elizabeth and Charles Crandall are still there. Mr. Jones in 1980 bought land on the bluff overlooking Pipes Cove on the North Fork and built his current home.

With five granddaughters and one great-grandchild on the way — “They say it’s a boy,” Mr. Jones revealed — he’s amazed to make 90. “I kept thinking I’m not going to live. Who the hell could believe it,” he exclaimed.

“I still like it,” he said of his work as a paramedic both here and in Stewart, Florida, where he and Betty go for five months of the year. He said he didn’t know why it had appealed to him in the first place. “I can’t tell you. When I was a little kid, I’d chase fires and if there had been an accident I’d head toward it to see if I could help,” he said.

At Friday’s Town Board meeting, after board members read proclamations honoring him, he thanked Betty for her support, praised all the ambulance volunteers, and added, “I hope I have a few more years to work,” answering those calls from people who need him.

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