LisaJonesJennes

LISA JONES JENNES

1948-1986

by M.E. Rich

Mary Louise (Lisa) Jones, a founding member of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes at Albertus Magnus College, graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1970. An only child, she was a fierce and illuminating spirit whose ready wit, aplomb and espieglerie made her a natural leader. When the six young women who became the ASH attended the Gillette Luncheon at Keen's Chop House in 1968, Lisa charmed the cluster of BSI who paid her court and, after the evening's excitement on 23rd Street, it was Lisa who was interviewed by the New York Times' fledgling reporter, Lawrence Van Gelder. As her remarks were not included in his subsequent story, it must be supposed that his interest in Lisa's views were not wholly professional. Their lively conversation added an appropriate fillip of flirtation to an already exhilarating escapade.

Lisa paid homage to Holmes with the ASH at the Algonquin in January 1969 and 1970, but with graduation and a move to Boston she became more involved with other pursuits, which included teaching, editing, politics, and captaining a ferryboat. She remained in touch with her college chums, however, even when further removed to Durham, NC with her husband, a professor at Duke University. Lisa's death in 1986 was due to a virulent and swift brain cancer, a particularly ironic and cruel fate for one so dazzlingly gifted and so very young.

Ave atque Vale.

and another note from M.E. Rich, this from the ASH Spring Dinner 2006:

I want to recall Lisa Jones Jennes, an original picatrice, who died twenty years ago of brain cancer at a very young thirty-eight years of age. She was a beloved only child of great promise and gifts. Leaving Albertus Magnus in 1970, she moved to Boston’s South Shore where she taught, edited, married, divorced, married again, and relocated to North Carolina. With typical bravado, Lisa learned to pilot a commuter ferryboat across Boston Harbor, earning her captain’s license—the first given to a woman by the company. She looked just like the actress Jane Alexander (right), tall and spare, with a bright and inquisitive gaze. Second in her class at Albertus, she wrote wonderful letters and goofy pastiches mixing the Beatles, Captain Kirk, and the Canon.

Picture, if you will, the nascent ASH—Ev, Pat, Linda, Mary Ellen One, Mary Ellen Two, and Lisa—strolling through New Haven on an October night, dressed in our approximations of Halloween costumes. In a vaguely Chekhovian mode, I wore a coat trimmed with Persian lamb and Cossack boots, while Lisa strode briskly in knickers, bomber jacket, and World War I leather flying ace helmet. Or conjure up a vision of the two of us in the dark of night channeling the spirit of Bill Baring-Gould via Ouija board to the delight—and dismay—of our elders, who knew the august Baker Street Irregular. We fenced in the hallways and up the sweeping circular stairway of our mansion-dormitory, we had very serious conversations about Poetry, and she did a justly famous one-woman version of Ahmal and the Night Visitors complete with costume changes and props. What the nuns made of us I can’t imagine. She was fierce and funny and true and, if any one of us could have changed the world, I’d have bet all my money on Lisa.

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