Clifford A. Jones

Who was Clifford A. Jones?

Clifford Aaron Jones, Sr. was an American politician. He was the 20th Lieutenant Governor of Nevada from January 1947 to December 1954.

Clifford A. Jones' was also the founder of the Jones, Jones Close & Brown branch of the one of Nevada's legendary law firms, today known as Jones Vargas.

Cliff Jones was born in Long Lane, Missouri. His family moved to Las Vegas in 1931 while Cliff was in college at the University of Missouri. When they weren’t attending school, both Cliff and his younger brother, Herbert M. Jones, worked on the construction of Boulder Dam in the 1930s, working their way up from servers at the Anderson mess hall to various jobs including mucker, puddler, signalman, crane operator and power hose operator.

While an undergraduate, Cliff took classes at the University of Missouri School of Law, with the result that Cliff had accumulated three years of law school credits before he actually graduated from law school. This qualified Cliff to sit for the Nevada bar exam during his final semester of law school. Consequently, in the winter of 1937, Cliff traveled from Columbia, Missouri to Carson City and took the exam. He was notified later that semester that he had passed.