Dick Jones
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| Dick Jones | |
|---|---|
| Born | Dickie Jones February 25, 1927 Snyder, Texas, USA |
| Years active | 1934 - 1965 |
Dick Jones (born February 25, 1927) is an American actor who achieved some success as a child and as a young adult, especially in B-Westerns and television. He is best known as the voice of Pinocchio in the 1940 Walt Disney film.
Jones was born in Snyder, Texas. The son of a newspaper editor, Jones was a prodigious horseman from infancy, billed at the age of four as the "World's Youngest Trick Rider and Trick Roper".
At the age of six, he was hired to perform riding and lariat tricks in the rodeo owned by Western star Hoot Gibson. Gibson convinced young Jones and his parents that there was a place for him in Hollywood, so the boy and his mother moved there.
Gibson arranged for some small parts for the boy, whose good looks, energy, and pleasant voice quickly landed him more and bigger parts, both in low-budget Westerns and in more substantial productions. Although often uncredited, he was usually known as Dickie Jones. A well known early film role is the film A Man to Remember (1938). Jones also appeared as a bit player in several of Hal Roach's Our Gang (Little Rascals) shorts. In 1939, Dickie Jones appeared as a troublesome kid named 'Killer Parkins' in the film, Nancy Drew-Reporter. In the film he did a good imitation of Donald Duck.
In 1940, he had one of his most prominent (though invisible) roles, as the voice of Pinocchio in Walt Disney's animated film of the same name. Jones attended Hollywood High School and at 15, took over the role of Henry Aldrich on the hit radio show The Aldrich Family.
He learned carpentry and augmented his income with jobs in that field. He served in the Army in Alaska during the final months of World War II. Gene Autry, who before the war had cast Jones in several Westerns, put him back to work in films and particularly in television, on programs produced by Autry's company.
Now billed as Dick Jones, the handsome young man starred as Dick West, sidekick to the Western hero known as The Range Rider, in a TV series that ran for 76 episodes in 1951 (and for decades in syndication).
Autry gave Jones his own series, Buffalo Bill Jr. (1955), which ran for 42 episodes on NBC. Jones continued working in films throughout the 1950s, then retired and entered the business world.
