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Robert Reynolds Jones, Sr. (October 30, 1883 – January 16, 1968) was an American evangelist, pioneer religious broadcaster and the founder and first president of Bob Jones University. ==Early years== Bob Jones was the son of William Alexander and Georgia Creel Jones and the eleventh of twelve children. In 1883, when Bob was born, Alex Jones, a Confederate veteran, was working a small farm in Dale County, Alabama, but within months the family moved to Brannon Stand west of Dothan. All the unmarried Jones children helped work the farm there, and Bob Jones often sold the family vegetables door-to-door in Dothan. Jones later recalled, "We may have been a little undernourished, but we built some character."〔Turner, ''Standing Without Apology'', 3〕 Jones's elementary schooling was sketchy by modern standards, but the boy early exhibited a quick mind and oratorical ability. Alex Jones had Bob memorize passages from the Bible and from literature, and Bob, who was "timid and self-conscious," was regularly called on to perform for guests. Jones later recalled, "I did whatever my father said to do, but when he told me to 'say the speech,' I suffered agony that nobody could possibly know."〔Turner, 6〕 Jones must have quickly overcome his stage fright, however, for by 1895, as a twelve-year-old, he gave a spirited, twenty-minute defense of the Populist Party while standing on a dry-goods box in front of a Dothan drug store. His gifts were recognized by Dr. Charles Jefferson Hammitt (1858–1935), a Methodist missionary from Philadelphia and former president of Mallalieu Seminary (1882–1923), a Methodist secondary school in Kinsey. Jones boarded with the Hammitts and helped pay his board by serving the household, even taking orders from the Hammitt children. Jones graduated from Mallalieu in 1900, and the following year he entered Southern College (later Birmingham-Southern College) at Greensboro, Alabama, supporting himself with his preaching. He attended until 1904 but by then was already so prominent as an evangelist that he left without taking a degree, in part to help support two widowed sisters.〔Turner, 6-8; Mallalieu Seminary catalog, 1897-98.〕 By the time Jones was 17, both his father and mother were dead. In 1905, Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who contracted tuberculosis and died within ten months of their marriage. On June 17, 1908, he married Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, whom he had met as a choir member during a meeting he was conducting in Uniontown, Alabama. Their only child, Bob Jones, Jr. was born October 19, 1911 in Montgomery, where they made their home. Mary Gaston Jones died on May 12, 1989 in her 101st year—83 years after the death of her husband's first wife. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bob Jones, Sr.」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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