NEWBURYPORT – Richard Jones, who is retiring this month as city clerk, told a story last week of how he bristled recently when he was told “at least you have a hobby.”
“It’s not a hobby,” Jones said with a smile and twinkle in his eye.
To him, being an artist is his job. “I’ve always done art and something else,” he said last week.
“Something else” for the 74-year-old icon of city hall has been keeping city hall running smoothly for the last 19 years from drafting ordinances to securing passports and dog licenses to marrying couples. Before that, he was a lawyer, a software engineer and for eight years the city’s solicitor until he was fired for putting a campaign sign in his front yard supporting a candidate who lost his bid for reelection as mayor.
For most of his adult life, Jones has been a prolific painter of portraits and street scenes in Newburyport, Boston, Nantucket and anywhere he could set up an easel.
His love of painting started when he walked into his neighbor’s room as a freshman at the College of the Holy Cross. The young man, who had graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, had several paintings hanging on his walls.
“Who painted these?” Jones asked. When the student told him he had, Jones raced off to the dean to change his major to art and sign up for his first painting class. “Holy Cross had good drawing classes,” he said. He took watercolor painting his first semester because the oil painting class was fully booked.
He has been painting watercolors and oil paintings ever since. But the practical Jones knew he did not want to be a starving artist. So he went to Suffolk Law School and Tufts Law School to learn the law. A first job was as a clerk for a justice at the Ohio Supreme Court, a job he enjoyed and where he tried out wearing bow ties. When an older lawyer told him he did not have to dress so formally, it motivated him to wear bow ties every day.
When the then-Newburyport mayor Dick Sullivan offered him the job of city solicitor, the justice advised him: “Don’t tell lawyers that you’re an artist. They won’t respect you. And don’t tell artists you’re a lawyer.”
He remembers his first case defending the city against a lawsuit filed by a fired police officer. “My legs were shaking,” he recalled as he presented his argument in Superior Court. “The judge took pity on me and ruled in the city’s favor.”
Jones may have stayed longer than eight years as Newburyport’s solicitor if he had had not put a sign in his yard in favor of the reelection of then-Mayor Peter Mathews. When Ed Molin defeated Mathews, the new mayor told Jones to pack his briefcase.
The painter took himself to Boston where he was selected to be one of only 75 artists admitted to the Artists Guild and given the chance to work in a studio in the guild’s building on Newbury Street. There he made a living painting portraits of the Beacon Hill elite.
One day, as he painted on the sidewalks of Nantucket, a man stopped to buy the painting. A descendant of the Mellon family, he and Jones became friends. The scion of the super wealthy banking family asked him to paint a Nantucket scene from the cupola of his house. Jones painted the scene, but the rebel in him had him paint it from the perspective of a neighbor’s house.
The artist never heard again from his patron again.
Seduced by the Internet, Jones became a software engineer as “the something else” job. But when his aunt told him the position of Newburyport city clerk was open, he applied for what she called “the perfect job for him.”
The city council agreed and offered him the position. It also included being the city’s parking clerk, which he described as “difficult.”
Being the city clerk “is a wonderful job,” he said. He wears many hats, presiding over elections, drafting and managing legislation for the council and retrieving birth and death records. He and his team also help residents apply for passports. And as a justice of the peace, he marries people.
The clerk’s office is often the first stop for new residents, who come to register to vote or buy a dog license. “It is a chance to help people,” he said.
From his roll top desk in the city council chambers, he rarely has a dull moment. While being interviewed for this article, a man asked him to notarize a document for the Belgian government that proved the man was still alive. “That’s a first,” Jones said.
The demands on his time have exploded during his tenure in city hall. Just retrieving officials records has grown from an hour a week to 10, he said.
But he still has Friday afternoons off when city hall is closed. On those afternoons, he can usually be found on the sidewalks of his hometown talking with friends and tourists while he paints.
“I love chatting with people,” he said. But if you encounter him at his easel, know that Richard Jones loves painting more. ♦
