Wichitan who embodied Indiana Jones before fictional character even existed has died

Schuyler Mead Jones, the Wichita native and globetrotting anthropologist some credited as the inspiration for action hero Indiana Jones, died May 17 at age 94.

He had enough experiences seemingly to fill several lifetimes.

That included crossing the Sahara and Siberia, hunting tigers with the king of Nepal from the back of an elephant, living with indigenous communities in the Belgian Congo, serving with the Kenyan police in the Mau Mau uprising and hunting crocodiles on the Zambezi River.

“He truly personified the great adventurer,” said longtime friend Annie Garvey. “I knew about Schuyler as a child because even then he was . . . a mythological character in my family folklore.”

Then Garvey met him as an adult.

“He had this gorgeous, craggy profile. This enormous shock of white hair on top of his head. . . . He commanded attention with his gravely voice. He wasn’t loud. He was just commanding. . . . He could be so deadly earnest and serious, but he could turn the charm on if he needed to.”

If you never heard the apocryphal story that Jones was the model for Indiana Jones, there’s still a reasonable chance you would have noticed their similarities upon meeting him. That’s even if he wasn’t wearing the brown fedora that he donned decades before the other Jones made it famous.

Years after the former University of Oxford professor and museum director returned to his native Wichita in 1999, he spoke to the downtown Rotary club about his beloved Afghanistan, where he once was so deeply ingrained — and where he had a tan and a bit of a beard — that people confused him for a native of one of the country’s Hindu Kush valleys.

Jones, the grandson of early Wichita settler J.R. Mead, was comfortable and self assured in his Rotary talk as he spoke of what he called the wonderful, welcoming Afghan people, yet also unassuming as he crossed his feet and stood ever so slightly slouched in rumpled clothing that still managed to appear more cosmopolitan than the roomful of pressed suits he was in.

Family heritage

Jones’ mother, Ignace Mead Jones, was born to Fern Hoover Mead and J.R. Mead eight years before his 1910 death at age 73. Though Schuyler Jones never knew his grandfather, he was similar to him physically at the very least.

Jack Kellogg, who is a historian as well as the owner of Hatman Jack’s Wichita Hat Works, said looking into Mead’s eyes “was kind of like looking into the face of an oncoming freight train.”

Jones also had an intense stare, Kellogg said.

Mead also passed on his chiseled features and mop of plentiful hair to his grandson.

Before his family moved to a house on Broadview in College Hill, Jones grew up on a farm on North Hydraulic in what today is Park City, and his pursuits were the same ones he likely would have had if he’d lived in his grandfather’s time, such as riding on his cherished former cavalry horse, Toby.

“He always said he got along better with horses and dogs than people,” said Cassandra Da’Luz Vieira, Jones’ stepdaughter.

Only recently, Jones requested that pictures of Toby and his dear Muffin, a basset hound who outlived him, be framed.

Jones married Lorraine Da’Luz Vieira-Jones when Da’Luz Vieira was 8. He always considered her his daughter.

Da’Luz Vieira said Jones’ early education was through reading, not necessarily formal schooling.

“The family farmhouse had tons of books, so books were his window into the world.”

Jones liked to tell of his lowly ranking in his graduating class at Wichita High School, which today is know as East High School, Da’Luz Vieira said.

“They told him how he would never amount to anything more than a janitor.”

Romping around Europe

Travels came early to Jones, who went to places such as Hawaii and South America with his family.

His younger sister, Sharon Jones Laverentz, said, “I believe that my brother had been in, like, all 50 states before he was in first grade,” thanks to their father’s Teitzel Jones Boot Co. regularly supplying Army bases with boots.

Still, Jones longed for sojourns of his own.

Skipping college, Jones hitchhiked to New York not long after high school, spent a brief time working as a photographer for a news agency, then used about $40 his mother had given him for passage to Europe.

After romping around England and France, Jones met an Australian explorer and the two went on an expedition across Africa.

“And that’s how the adventures began,” Da’Luz Vieira said.

Jones started selling photos of his journeys to National Geographic. He got into film as well.

In his first book, “Under the African Sun,” Jones told the story of taking the doors off a Bell helicopter and filming a mosque and crowded village square in In Salah in central Algeria, not thinking much when he noticed “a thin haze of blue smoke in the cabin.”

“The pilot pulled the helicopter to a hovering stop 300 feet above the mosque and I leaned out of the open side to film the crowded scene below. Suddenly he swore. Startled, I looked round to find the cockpit full of smoke. Before I could move or think he cut the power and we dropped out of the sky like a sack of bricks to land squarely in the middle of the market place.

“Camels bawled and ran, scattering loads of firewood in all directions. Children, Arabs and veiled women either fled or fell full length in the dust. Goats and donkeys went wild as the whirling, roaring monster landed in their midst.”

Jones discovered he was on fire. He also then learned the source of the catastrophe: his pipe, which 80-mile-an-hour winds fanned from ashes to flames.

“Weak with relief, the pilot and I sat in the wreckage of In Salah’s market place and roared with laughter.”

‘The most valuable thing’

During this time, Jones also translated German texts to French and English to make money.

Later, Jones said his German class — along with a typing class — “was the most valuable thing he got from all his schooling.”

To this day, if you buy a Minox spy camera, instructions will say “translated by Schuyler Jones.”

Jones married his first wife, Lis Margot Sondergaard Rasmussen, in 1955.

Along with teaching English in Greece to make ends meet for his growing family, Jones continued taking and selling photos as well.

“He was more interested in the people and cultures he was finding than he was in photography and selling those,” said his son, archaeologist Peter Jones.

He said his father realized he needed to go back to school to enable him to do more research or perhaps have a position at a museum in Kabul.

Oxford rejected him as a student, but Edinburgh took him, and he came to love the school and Scotland.

Eventually, Jones did go to Oxford for his Ph.D. He ended up scrapping plans to return to Afghanistan and stayed at Oxford for 30 years, becoming director of the prestigious Pitt Rivers Museum, which houses the university’s archaeological and anthropological collections.

At some point in the 1980s, Jones first heard of Indiana Jones from a director of a museum in Madras.

“Tell me,” the attractive woman in a red sari said, as Jones recounted in “A Stranger Abroad,” “is it true that you are the original Indiana Jones?”

He wrote, “I had no idea what she was talking about, but many years at Oxford had taught me never to admit ignorance of anything that I could talk my way out of.”

He continued, “Gradually I learned that there was a widespread belief among Oxford students that I was the ‘original Indiana Jones’, which caused me to wonder if that was why attendance at my lectures had recently risen from about 100 to 300.”

In the final chapter of “A Stranger Abroad,” Jones wrote a P.S.

“Recently some acquaintances of ours who live up near Abilene, Kansas on the Old Chisholm Trail [J.R. Mead had been business partners with Jesse Chisholm] have been viewing me with some suspicion because a friend of theirs named Jones is an archaeologist working in the Holy Land and they are convinced that he is the ‘real’ Indiana Jones, which makes me, in their eyes, an imposter (sic). Since I have never claimed to be Indiana Jones, ‘original’, ‘real’ or otherwise, this seems a bit unfair. In conclusion all I can say is that their Holy Land Jones is welcome to the title.”

Destiny calls

Although he never intended to remain at Oxford, Schuyler Jones seemed destined to teach in some capacity.

His son said he enjoyed the educational aspect of being at Oxford and opening people’s eyes to cultures all over the world.

Da’Luz Vieira said Jones was an academic without an academic’s background, so “it was refreshing for students.”

Like Indiana Jones, however, Schuyler Jones “did always say that everything belonged in a museum” and kept properly, she said.

He donated his thousands of photographs to the museum where he worked.

While gracious with young people and those he liked, friends said Jones didn’t abide fools.

Pat O’Connor, a publisher who worked with Jones, said Jones “had a low tolerance for people who were slow-witted and pretentious.”

“I’ve never met a man so talented and capable and at the same time approachable,” O’Connor said. “But if you transgressed . . . by trying to present yourself as somewhat above your station intellectually, then that is the end. That is all. He was done with you.”

Eric Cale knew Jones from the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum, where Cale is executive director.

“We did on occasion talk shop, and he was very encouraging and very supportive of the museum.”

That included turning his mother’s loan of his grandfather’s artifacts into a permanent donation to the museum.

“Those artifacts are just unparalleled,” Cale said. “They are an amazing collection for the community.”

He added that “it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone rivaling his grandfather . . . but Dr. Jones may have outdone him.”

The queen and I

Da’Luz Vieira said having someone as a father who “lived so much life across so many decades and across the world” meant regular history lessons at home.

A TV show such as “The Crown” would spark a memory of an experience Jones had, such as being in Kenya and hearing on the radio that the king of England had died and his daughter, Elizabeth, who also was in Kenya at the time, was ascending the throne.

The queen had Jones to her palaces a few times and named him a Commander of the British Empire, a rank just below knighthood.

Schuyler Jones is survived by his son, three daughters, including Hannah Lis Jones and Carol Jones Roth, and his sister along with six grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

In more recent years, he had a relationship with the actress and mezzo-soprano Karla Burns, whom Jones first met when she was performing as Queenie in “Show Boat” in Stratford-upon-Avon. He went backstage to say hello and mention that he, too, was from Wichita.

When Jones returned to Wichita and his second wife died, Garvey reintroduced him to Burns at a birthday party she threw each year for him and her mother, who were born eight years and four days apart.

Before Burns’ untimely death at age 66 in 2021, Jones — who wasn’t interested in organized religion and made it clear he didn’t want a funeral — did once allow, “Have a party, and perhaps Karla can be persuaded to sing something.”

There are some goals Jones didn’t accomplish, as he noted in “A Stranger Abroad.” That included boyhood dreams such as being the first to scale Mount Everest and finding the Ark of the Covenant (there’s that Indiana Jones connection again) to donate to a grateful museum.

Jones said he had enough other successful expeditions that helped “offset those losses.”

He also acknowledged that not all of his escapades would be possible these days, in part due to difficulties and safety issues that didn’t exist when he was bouncing about the globe.

“Other of my travels would, if made today, be so different, so altered by ‘progress’ as to be scarcely recognizable.”

Still, it seemed he believed in the possibility of adventure around most any corner.

As he told his children, “You have to put yourself out there, and these things will happen.”