A family sends off a favorite son

At 19, Jimmy James Jones did not have a high school diploma, a good car or a snazzy job. He worked in a restaurant kitchen.

Yet his friendly demeanor and quiet devotion to his work won him many admirers among his colleagues at the upscale Grady's restaurant in the Novi Town Center.

Jimmy started at the restaurant when it opened last August; it was a step up from his job at a Big Boy in Troy. He began as a dishwasher at $5.50 an hour, then moved up to prep cook, then to salad maker at $7.25.

He liked his job. "The people at Grady's treat me real nice," he once told his grandmother, with whom he lived on Piedmont Street in Northwest Detroit. For his part, he was always punctual and glad to be called and asked to work on his days off.

When Jimmy died in a car accident the Friday before last, the staff of Grady's—about 100 people—was plunged into a gloom the likes of which the restaurant had not seen. Even the customers seemed quiet.

"People are usually very up here," says Sue Candela, 25, a waitress. "We're good-time Grady's. But we were all very down. It was horrible."

As Jimmy was not from a family of extravagant means—he gave much of his pay to his grandmother—the employees pitched in about $700 for the funeral. When his grandmother arrived to pick up the check, they asked, "Would you like something to eat?"

And though she declined, they went home and made brownies, carrot cake, pasta salads and such; and last Thursday, Mark Barnett, one of the managers, took those and a couple of deli trays to the family home.

There he told them of one evening last year, an unusually busy Saturday, when two of three dishwashers walked out, leaving Jimmy amid huge piles of dishes, some stacked on the floor. "I'm fine," Jimmy told his boss and hung in until the last dish was clean. "That was just like Jimmy," Barnett said.

About 20 Grady's employees in several cars were the first to arrive Saturday at Swanson Funeral Home for the service. None of them could walk away from the open casket with dry eyes.

At Grady's, says general manager Eric Wildman, 32, "We're a lot like family."

Says Jimmy's grandmother, Margaret Jones: "I don't think nobody could have done Jimmy any better. Your own folks wouldn't do what they did."

This story originally appeared in The Detroit Free Press and has been published here for portfolio purposes only. The photo is not the original photo.