But the trips I did were to Jamaica. The pot was sinsemilla and the loads were usually built in. In the later years, we took presses and seal-a-meal bags down and the pot was compacted into one-pound bricks, double sealed with no smell and sold for seven hundred to a thousand dollars a pound. We were cruisers, usually worked our way thru the Bahamas on our way to Jamaica. We never would clear out or clear back in with U.S. Customs.
So now I am going back to my early years to tell how I got to this point. My father’s name is Glynn N.C. Jones Jr. He is eighty-nine years old and now lives in Port Richey, Florida, where I visited him a few weeks ago and introduced him to my fourteen-year-old son, Nicholas. My grandfather was Glynn N.C. Jones Sr. He passed away in 1964. My mother, Mary Ann Griffin Jones, who I adored, passed away in 2000. My name is Glynn N.C. Jones III. I was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on August 19, 1949. Growing up in the mid ‘50s, I remember Elvis singing “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel.” In the ‘60s, Elvis would play every year or two in Montgomery. Sadly, I never got to see him perform. Hank Williams Sr. was popular. He was raised in the Montgomery area and his mother owned a local boarding house in town. Everyone knew Hank. My earliest childhood recollection was a memorial service held at City Auditorium in Montgomery for Hank Williams Sr. I could remember all the rows of
folding metal chairs, which my mother later confirmed.
Montgomery was segregated back then. There were segregated white and colored drinking fountains and bathrooms. Blacks ordered food from take-out windows in white restaurants, stayed in black-only hotels, rode in black- owned taxis, and rode only in the back of city buses. The local newspaper, Montgomery Advertiser, had a black supplement that was inserted into the paper and these were marked with stars on the right-hand side of the front page.