Fans to descend on Davy Jones’s Pennsylvania hideout
Hamlet of Beavertown hosts memorial
In death, you could say, Monkees singer Davy Jones is on tour again.
His funeral was Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. Memorials are planned in Los Angeles, New York City, and his native England. But amid the global fanfare, legions of social-media-savvy fans are flocking to this rural Pennsylvania borough for a modest commemoration.
Tiny Beavertown, 250 kilometres northwest of Philadelphia, is honouring Jones on Saturday with a fourhour event to celebrate his music and pay tribute to a fondly remembered resident.
Jones, 66, who died Feb. 29 in Florida, bought a clapboard home in Beavertown two decades ago. Here, the 1960s teen idol could ride his horses, feed his cats and live in anonymity.
Jones, immortalized by chart-topping hits such as Daydream Believer, spent recent winters in Florida but called Beavertown home. He hosted neighbours at his modest Colonial with peeling yellow paint. He was restoring a tumbledown church, hoping to create a Monkees museum and a theatre. He rode his horses around town and paid his water bill, like the other 976 residents, at the borough hall.
The area counts among its population many Amish and Mennonites who work in the building trades and on family farms.
For years, the borough’s most famous resident was a car — the Lulu, a short-lived model made by the Kearns Motor Car Co. in 1914. Then Jones arrived.
He planted roots in this remote spot, buying five hectares on the borough’s edge. The house was large but hardly fancy, with stables out back.
What drew the one-time international heartthrob here? Mayor Cloyd Wagner says Jones first visited with a former Monkees musical director who hailed from the borough, and he fell in love with the rolling landscape. “He said, ‘This is just like England,’ ” recalled Wagner, who described Jones as someone you’d run into at the post office — a contrast from the years when, as for- mer bandmate Michael Nesmith told
Rolling Stone magazine this week, the Monkees regularly fled adoring fans “like rabbits.”
The Beavertown event is the brainchild of Altoona resident Mike Shoenfelt, who said he thought he was Jones’s No. 1 fan until he looked online.
Shoenfelt and the mayor decided on a two-part tribute: a “jam fest” on the Firemen’s Carnival Grounds at noon, followed by a 3 p.m. service at the church Jones was rehabbing.
A site on Facebook spread the word. Shoenfelt said in an email that after he plugged in a date, things took off.
Suddenly, more than 800 people from as far away as Texas and Ontario were vowing to trek to Beavertown.