When Elizabeth Jones began working for the UF College of Education in 1952, P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School was housed in Norman Hall. The building’s inhabitants, Jones said, ranged from kindergarteners to doctoral candidates at that time.
As an employee of UF for 61 years — longer than anyone else to date — Jones, known affectionately as “Miss Betty,” said she has seen the university grow from 10,000 students to 50,000 students. She’s seen Johnny Cash’s performance in the Florida Gym in 1964, integration of the student body on campus and the advancement of women’s athletics. She’s seen the construction of Century Tower and the establishment of the colleges of medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, fine arts and nursing.
Today Jones is a fixture in 1012 Turlington Hall. When she answers the phone, everyone is either “darlin’” or “honey,” but more often both. Last year, the academic technology department threw a party to celebrate her 80th birthday and her 60th year at UF.
UF, she said, is “my university.”
When she first began working as a secretary for the university’s industrial arts department at age 20, Jones lived in a boarding house with 16 other girls — a culture shock, she said, because she grew up on a farm with six brothers.
At the 1952 UF Homecoming parade, she met her husband, Harold. She was drawn to him immediately, she said, because he made her laugh. They got married at a tiny church in Lake Butler by the preacher who had baptized her.
After becoming pregnant in 1957, Jones retired from the university, ready to be an at-home mother. But when the secretary who replaced her also became pregnant, Miss Betty returned to take her place, and she was asked to work in the educational media center as a graduate student assistant supervisor. In 1973, she moved to the Office of Instructional Resources, which has since evolved into the Office of Academic Technology. Jones retired once again in 1992 but couldn’t keep herself away — she has worked as a part-time other personnel services employee ever since.
In her spare time, she’s an avid reader of adventure and mystery novels.
She was offered other jobs in Gainesville, Jacksonville and Washington, D.C., over the course of her career, but the thought of leaving the students and professors she loved was unbearable.
“And to think, darlin’, I could have changed Washington,” she said, laughing. “But I really found that this was best for me, and I just wouldn’t change my life or where I wound up.”
