Necrology

Forrest Lowell Jones II '65

Aug. 11, 1943-Dec. 26, 2022

Forrest Lowell Jones II ’65 died in Los Angeles on Dec. 26, 2022. Born in San Francisco on Aug. 11, 1943, he later lived in Fort Bragg, Calif., Highland Park, Ill., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., and Ardsley-on-Hudson, N.Y., because his father’s work as a sales manager for the Union Lumber Co. required periodic relocations. Forrest came to Hamilton from The Choate School. On the Hill, he majored in English and became a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. He also played on the hockey team, noting in his 40th reunion yearbook that he “wasn’t exactly a star.” He also described himself as a mediocre student but nevertheless won the John Howard Cunningham Essay Prize, awarded to a senior submitting the best essay on some aspect of the life of Abraham Lincoln.

After graduation, Forrest traveled, as he put it, “through [Professor of Art] Paul Parker’s Europe of art and architecture” before settling for a time in Madrid, Spain, where he hoped to write a novel in emulation of Ernest Hemingway and to practice his Spanish. In 1966, he joined the Navy, attended Officer Candidate School in San Diego, and, with the rank of lieutenant, served two tours of duty on the destroyer USS Baine (DD-630) in the Gulf of Tonkin from 1966 to 1968. Thereafter, during 1968 and 1969, he had shore duty at Guantanamo Bay. While there, he fell for the charms of the Caribbean Sea; he would later choose to live there in retirement.

Shortly after his honorable discharge in the summer of 1969, Forrest became reacquainted with Mady Riegel, whom he had first met on the Hill at the wedding of his fraternity brother Scott Hand ’64. They were married in December of that same year and stayed together for 12 years. A few months after the wedding, Forrest and Mady moved to San Francisco, where his first job was with the publisher W.H. Freeman (founded by William H. Freeman, Class of 1926), a company specializing in college textbooks in the sciences. His assignment was to seek out manuscripts worthy of publication, which involved visiting colleges and universities in a given territory ostensibly to promote recent publications, but also to encourage faculty members to develop their own manuscripts.

Tiring of all of the travel this job required and following the birth of his son Bayard in 1973, Forrest left W.H. Freeman. He and Mady had by then developed an interest in cooking, going so far as to take classes with local chefs, and decided to open what he would later describe as an “upscale kitchenware store” — Forrest Jones, Inc. — in a 3,000-square-foot space. There they stocked a great variety of dinnerware, kitchen appliances, and related housewares. The store also included a working kitchen in which some of San Francisco’s leading chefs taught cooking lessons to interested customers. 

Forrest Jones’s inventory subsequently expanded beyond kitchen and housewares to the point where Forrest would later describe it as “an eclectic general store,” and its location on Sacramento Street helped to resuscitate that neighborhood’s shopping district. Later, for a time, there were two branches, one elsewhere in San Francisco, the other in San Rafael, Calif. 

The store attracted the favorable attention of The San Francisco Chronicle in 1995 when it was mentioned in a front-page article headlined, “49 Reasons Why San Francisco is Super,” the “49” a reference to the San Francisco 49ers winning their fifth Super Bowl that year.

Concurrently with operating his stores, Forrest pursued an interest in clinical psychology at San Francisco State University. Admitted to the doctoral program in 1994, he noted in his 40th reunion yearbook: “I did not complete [the degree], but I was a far better grad student than ever I’d been as an undergrad.”

In 2003, Forrest and Tom Ewig, a longtime friend from Ardsley-on-Hudson, took a sailing cruise of the Western Caribbean that included stops in nearby Belize. One of the port calls was at the town of San Pedro, at the southern end of a small island, Ambergris Caye. For Forrest, it was the most interesting and lively port on this cruise, and four years later he closed his stores, determined to retire to San Pedro. His plan was interrupted by a diagnosis of lung cancer, but in 2008, he made the move and, except for periodic visits to the U.S. to consult with his doctors, remained there until the fall of 2022, living in a condominium at the San Pedro Yacht Club.

Forrest quickly immersed himself in the life of San Pedro by helping to found the San Pedro Sailing Club and establishing a sailing program for local children. Over time, several hundred young people attended, and he was their principal sailing instructor. In 2012, the club sent sailors to the North American Sailing Championships. In 2015 and 2016, it entered international competitions in Canada and Malaysia. Along the way, Forrest’s attention was drawn to Blanca Yesenia Velasquez,  a young girl with an unusual aptitude for the sport. He provided support for Blanca and later adopted her.

Eventually, the cancer he was fighting reached the terminal stage and, on Oct. 30, 2022, Forrest left San Pedro for Los Angeles accompanied by his son Pierson and Blanca, who had been caring for him in Belize. He died not quite two months later.

Hamilton meant a great deal to him. Forrest reflected on the College’s impact upon him in his 40th reunion yearbook: “I value, and I believe that I continue to retain what I did learn and what Hamilton is widely recognized for — teaching articulate self-expression, critical thinking (a.k.a. ‘b.s. detection’), and one more thing — a high degree of active curiosity. Curiosity and how it feels to pursue something with openness, whether you eventually ‘get it’ or not.”

He served the College as a volunteer for the Priorities for Hamilton capital campaign, as a member of his class’s committee, and as class correspondent from 2002 to 2018. 

Forrest Lowell Jones II is survived by his two sons, daughter, and former wife.

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