Joe Jack Lones

Loving father, faithful and true friend. Chaser of photons, clouds, adventures, fun, smiles and laughter. Defender of all that is good. An enthusiastic life well-lived. Joe Jack Lones, born October 23, 1933, passed away unexpectedly on January 12, 2019. In Joe’s words, “it has been my good fortune to travel life’s roads offering vast opportunities for learning and adventure.”

Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, always Joe Jack at heart, he enjoyed numerous mischievous escapades with his young friends. His dog Sparky at his side, his pals biking alongside him, they romped through Dallas afternoons looking for trouble as young boys do. Rainy afternoons and evenings were filled with model-airplane building. Other times, he would take his cousins to the movies and then treat them to the penny arcades. Lifelong friends, he was blessed with their companionship.

During World War II Joe was in elementary school. His mother was a nurse at an airplane factory, and he often joined her there after school and watched the planes file off the assembly line. His first hint at a life filled with the love of flying. During the war he was in charge of selecting vegetables for dinner from the family’s Victory Garden and he recalled military men walking past his front yard, saluting him and his friends as they stood tall, boys of ten years or so saluting back.

During high school, Joe joined the ROTC and was a star on the rifle team, excelling at putting a legendary 100 bullets through a single bullet hole.

After his Highland Park high school graduation, Joe attended the University of Texas on a riflery scholarship, where more hijinks and adventures happened. He preferred to own a motorboat rather than a car and shared many great escapades with friends on Texas lakes. Joe received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from UT in 1956, and then went off to Navy Flight School.

After completing flight school, he served in the Navy, achieving the rank of lieutenant. During his almost two years flying patrols in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, his spare time found him participating in the Eisenhower People to People Program via the University of Hong Kong Fisheries Research Unit. They were engaged in creating a pearl industry to occupy multitudes of refugees fleeing Mao’s repression in China. He had many exciting adventures in the Navy, including a personal visit from Air Force One and a subsequent flight to Emperor Hirohito’s birthday party. It was there that he also began taking pictures underwater, a passion that would continue for the rest of his life.

After his military service, Joe began his engineering career at Aerojet-General in Sacramento, California where he was a test engineer on the Polaris and Minuteman missile programs. Leaving Sacramento, he joined a high-school classmate for a six-month adventure exploring Mexico on a motorcycle.

After the motorcycle trip he accidentally landed permanently in San Diego working at Scripps Institute of Oceanography Visibility Laboratory designing, assembling, taking to sea and orbital space a multitude of optical instruments and cameras. During his time at Scripps, Joe performed post-graduate studies in Optical Technology at the University of Rochester. At the Vis Lab Joe met and later married the love of his life, Elaine. Together they enjoyed the young family years with their two children, Loren and Lance. After they separated they remained friends for life.

Joe’s experience at the Vis Lab became the foundation for starting his own research instrument company in 1968, Adroit Engineering, which he continued to lead until a few months before he passed.  From Adroit’s headquarters in Point Loma, Joe continued developing optical systems for airborne and orbital space platforms, underwater cameras, high-speed instrumentation cameras, image processing, and machine vision metrology. Vietnam and the Cold war eras produced significant funding for his company, but the real fun was designing building a huge underwater camera for the Disney “Circle Vision” Theater. In his words, “It is hard to imagine the good fortune of being paid to have so much fun! … And that is the way it has been, from Scripps to now.” His work at Adroit extended to instrumentation for production and quality control in such diverse industries as cosmetics, golfing, bicycle tires and automotive headlamp beam alignment.

Early in his professional life, Joe was a founder of the San Diego chapter of the Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). He recalled the first meeting where they had to scrounge for tables and chairs because more people showed up than expected. San Diego SPIE is still going strong, and the annual SPIE convention is held in San Diego and occupies the full Convention Center.

Throughout his life, Joe collected friends. At the University of Texas and flight school his roommates became lifelong friends leading to many enjoyable encounters through the years. His diving friends joined him in a successful search for jade off the coast of California. He spent hours in the air in gliders and planes with friends exploring the skies. He extended and received many friendships from the SPIE crowd, Vis Lab folks, and neighbors along the way. His weekly Shelter Island Bocce crowd brought him great delight.

Joe was always civic-minded. At one point the City of San Diego wanted to eliminate the grass circle where the Bocce games took place, so he lobbied the city and got the circle declared a historic location thus saving the Bocce game that continues to this day. Another time Joe, a tree lover, chained himself to a tree outside his home to save it.

Toward the end of his career Joe promoted science education for K-12 via the “Magic Show of Light”, making science fun was his focus.

Most of all though, Joe was enormously devoted to, loved, and proud of his children, Loren and Lance. They were his pride and joy, the bright spot in his life. He was always there, available and helpful. From scouts, to rowing meets, graduations, concerts, competitions, and all events in between, big and small, you would find him encouraging them to do their very best and offering a helping hand to them all the way to the end. And it was indeed a helping hand with a smile, laughter, bit of fun, underlined always with safety. In fact, he famously got his kids INTO motorcycle riding rather than out of it (they first had to complete the CHP motorcycle safety course) and they had many fun adventures together on the backroads of San Diego County. Among other things, together they enjoyed roller skating, sailing, and biking in San Diego, a road trip to Colorado, many trips back to Joe’s hometown of Dallas and a fishing excursion to Alaska.

He was Joe Jack, Mr. Joe Lones, Dad – Master of the Art of Living. He lived a beautiful life. He will be intensely missed.

In lieu of flowers, 

Donations may be made to:

Lambs Players Theater
Web: http://lambsplayers.org

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