Longtime reporter Treva Jones wrote with love and care about Raleigh’s lives and deaths

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Treva Jones, a born storyteller, virtuosic news reporter and historian to a generation of Raleigh Times and News & Observer readers and staff writers, died Friday.

She was 73.

Jones, who authored more obituaries than possibly any other one writer ever to work for the N&O, would have crafted her own and filed it in the publishing system for use now had she imagined that her passing would be news.
It is; because of her innate toughness, she was widely expected to live forever.

“If you hear anyone refer to my ‘retirement,’ please straighten them out,” she said after leaving the paper in 1999, according to a commemorative fake front page created for the occasion. “Apparently, they think I’m sitting on my ass, eating bonbons and drinking pina coladas, and drawing a nice pension.”

She earned the right to do so, even if she preferred finding other ways to serve the community she had called home for more than half a century.

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