Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Wednesday appointed Bill Jones of Pine Bluff, a prominent jeweler and chief executive officer of Sissy’s Log Cabin, to a seven-year term on the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
Jones, 58, a graduate of Pine Bluff High School, attended the University of Arkansas and graduated in 1984 from the Gemological Institute of America in Santa Monica, Calif. He said his family’s roots run deep in southeast Arkansas and he said he is proud to represent a part of the state that he feels is overlooked and unappreciated.
“We’ve been in Arkansas since 1794,” said Jones, who traces his lineage to the settlement at Arkansas Post. From there, his family settled around Gillette and DeWitt.
“We still have ties down there,” Jones said. “We go back a long time in Arkansas. It’s part of our legacy.”
Hutchinson said he considers appointments to the Game and Fish Commission equally important to judicial appointments because their policies and decisions affect every person in the state. He said his appointments to the agency must hunt and fish, and that they must understand the importance of public land to Arkansas’ hunters and anglers.
Hutchinson also said his Game and Fish appointees must base their policy decisions on science.
Jones said one of his priorities is to promote hunting and fishing among minorities through access to public land and through mentoring programs. Throughout his career, Jones said, his business has devoted a percentage of its income to minority mentorship programs. He said he also mentored young Black males in Pine Bluff by coaching Babe Ruth League and Junior Babe Ruth League baseball for about 10 years.
“I’d tell them that most of them were never going to play pro ball, but that they could accomplish great things through hard work and commitment,” Jones said. “My goal was to break the cycle [of poverty], and we did break it many, many times.”
“It worked because there was a respect that went both ways,” said Sharri Jones, his wife.
Promoting and enhancing habitat on public land can help Black Arkansans to discover hunting and fishing, Jones said. He also said he wants to tailor Game and Fish Commission education efforts to reach underserved minority populations.
“There’s so many people that don’t realize what Arkansas has to offer,” Jones said. “Through education and inclusiveness, we can show them all the wonderful things we have here in Arkansas. From fishing to hunting to shooting sports, being out on the lake, just being out in the woods, this is the greatest state that we can possibly ever have.”
As a sportsman, Jones said his passion is bowhunting. The late Ben Pearson, a legendary hunter and bowyer, was a Pine Bluff native who deeply influenced Jones. He said he has hunted plains game in Africa, and he killed a 2,200-pound bull moose with a bow. He said hunting deer in Arkansas still thrills him.
“People that don’t bow hunt don’t understand how difficult it is to draw a bow on a deer at 20 yards,” Jones said.
Jones said he took up bowhunting at a young age because he only had time to hunt during the early part of bow season. He started hunting with compound bows, advanced to recurve bows and then graduated to traditional longbows.
Now, he said, age has pushed him the other direction.
“I’ve gone to recurve and back to compounds,” Jones said. “I still shoot recurve quite a bit. I love to shoot aerial targets with my kids. It’s great fun if you’ve never tried it before. It’s all instinctive shooting.”
Jones said he strongly supports the commission’s deer management assistance program, which helps landowners manage deer herds on their property. He said high-quality habitat is the key to healthy wildlife populations on private and public land.
“Much of my ‘hunting’ is managing,” Jones said. “Burning, planting food plots, I enjoy that as much as the hunting aspect. As I get a little older, I get a little wiser. My efforts go away from just trying to kill trophy animals versus managing them and trying to conserve them for future generations.”
To that end, Jones said he wants to explore forming partnerships with industrial landowners such as paper companies, timber companies and land management companies to improve wildlife habitat in industrial pine forests in the Gulf Coastal Plain.
“I think that would be a fantastic idea, and I think they [landowners] would like that, also,” Jones said. “It would help their forests and their herds too. You wouldn’t believe how much damage overpopulations of deer will do to timber management.”
Jones said many people would be surprised by his deep affinity for hunting.
“Most people see me on the commercial selling jewelry and they think, ‘This guy never hunts!'” Jones said. “What I am true to heart is an outdoorsman.”
As a professional gemologist and jeweler, Jones said he considers Arkansas a treasure.
“Arkansas is a rare jewel,” Jones said. “I am honored and humbled to be a steward of this beautiful gem.”
Bill Jones of Pine Bluff meets Wednesday with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission employee Cory Gray (left) and Deputy Director Brad Carner (center) at the Witt Stephens Nature Center in Little Rock following a news conference announcing Jones as the agency’s newest commissioner. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)
