By Robert McMorris
(Omaha World-Herald, April 9, 1988)

He had green skin.
His eyes were bordered by black smudges.
His tousled red hair looked like a fright wig.
He wore a white smock that was smeared with "blood."
He spoke in a rasping voice, punctuated with fiendish chuckles.

That was Dr. San Guinaly, host of KMTV's Saturday night horror movie bill, "Creature Features." Many of the old films he introduced were, by his own onair admission, "real dogs." Yet for nearly a decade, beginning in 1971, the bloodsmeared "doctor" was the hottest property on local television in his time slot.

Jones without makeup ... "I'm gonna beat this."

Under the garish makeup was plain John Jones, funloving but mild-mannered producer-director who had never been seen on the air until he created the San Guinary character.

After "Creature Features" went off the air, Jones continued to play the doc in personal appearances and in the local phase of the annual Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon.

Despite several bouts with cancer last year, Jones worked the telethon as usual on Labor Day.

This was his 17th MD telethon. Since then he has been treated for two additional cancers. He suffered a stroke as well.

But he vowed to be back in green makeup again for his 18th telethon next September. "I have no doubt of it." "I'm convinced I'm gonna beat this thing," he said. "I have a positive attitude."

Jones, a 45-year-old Ralston resident, said his first hint that "something was wrong" came Feb. 4, 1987:
"I was sitting here at work, leaning back in my chair, and I felt a lump in my right armpit . .. My doctor took it out. He said, 'These things are usually benign.' But two days later he called me and said, 'It's a melanoma.' It's not good because, melanomas have such a high recurrence rate."

This type of cancer usually shows up first as a skin lesion. But there was no surface sign in his case, Jones said. He was referred to a cancer specialist.

A CAT scan of Jones' body revealed no additional tumors. But the specialist's prognosis was not encouraging. "He had the tact of wallpaper," Jones said.

'Made My Day'
"The first thing he said to me was 'You've got melanoma. It has an 85 percent recurrence rate. When it comes back, it most likely will hit a vital organ -- the lungs, liver or brain. We're going to switch you to chemotherapy, but I tell you right now it's not very effective.'

"I said,'You mean I'm terminal?' He said,'More than likely, yes.' "I said,'Thanks, Doctor, you've just made my day.' "It was 11 o'clock on a Thursday morning. I went to work. I had given up beer for Lent. Still, i damned near stopped at a bar for a stiff drink. But I thought if I did that and came down with another cancer, I would think God was punishing me for giving up my Lenten fast."

'Call His Sister'
In May a body scan revealed a tumor in Jones' left adrenal gland. It had encapsulated the spleen.

Surgeons removed the adrenal gland, the spleen, part of the pancreas and an 18-inch length of colon.

Following Jones' stroke Sept. 25, a brain tumor the size of a man's little finger was detected. "It had ruptured and was bleeding," Jones said.

"My doctor came and told my wife, Sheila,'Call his sister in Kansas City. The first 48 hours will be the telling point. The doctor asked me how I felt about life-support systems. "I just told him, i don't want to be a Karen Quinlan. I don't want machinery to do my living for me.

"So they started me on medication to control the bleeding and to bring down the swelling in my brain. I made it through the night. I was aiert enough to watch the River City Roundup on our station. I also watched the Huskers play Arizona State.

"The doctor came in two days later and said, 'Your out of the woods.' They started me on radiation. I got 27 doses. They didn't seem to bother me. But all my hair fell out." Last New Year's Day, Jones was watching the Nebraska-Florida State Festival Bowl football game when he felt a pain in the stomach. "They found another tumor," he said. "It was obstructing the bowel. They took it out." There have been no recurrences since.

Improving
Therapists have helped Jones overcome many of the effects of his stroke.

Problems in speaking virtually have disappeared. He has regained partial use of his once paralyzed right arm and leg. "l'm left-handed, anyway," he said.

He wears a leg brace and walks with a cane. "I have about 50 percent hip movement and 25 percent knee movement," he said. "I have nothing in the ankle and toes, but I have feeling there. I know there's life there." He goes to physical therapy sessions five mornings a week. "I'm making progress all the time," he said. "I have a jewel of a therapist."

He receives monthly chemotherapy treatments, and his condition is monitored by periodic body scans, chest X-rays and blood tests.

His hair has started a comeback on the sides and back. "I also have a little fuzz on top," he said. "I think it'll come back eventually." He now sports a reddish mustache and chin whiskers. Jones seemed most impatient by a persistent loss of appetite and the loss of weight as a result. "Before I got sick," he said,."I was probably one of the biggest beer drinkers in Omaha. Now I don't drink except if I'm offered a beer. I try to drink it to be sociable. But I'll have to leave half of it"

"Sometimes I go to lunch with what I think is a ravenous appetite. But half a sandwich will fill me up." Jones has weighed as much as 225 pounds. Now he is down to 138. "But I think my weight is stabilizing," he said. "When I got down to 173, I had a dozen sport coats and a dozen slacks altered. I'm just making the tailors rich."

When his weight continued to decline, he balked at further changes to his wardrobe except for two coats. In another indication of his determination to recover his health, he asked,' "Why should I have all my clothes sewed up? I'd just have to let them out again when I regain my weight," Jones maintains a part-time work schedule at KMTV. "I have good days and bad days," he said.

Class Clown
Jones was born and grew up in Lyons, Kan. "I was the class clown," he said.

He also was the class of the school as an actor. In his senior year he was president of the Drama Club and winner of an award as best actor in a play.

Jones studied broadcast journalism and speech at Creighton University, receiving a degree in 1965. His first and only job after graduation was with KMTV.

The creation of Dr. San Guinary and the launching of John Jones as a television personality took place in just four days in May in 1971.

Joe Baker, then the station's program director, decided "Creature Features" needed an unusual host to introduce his old movies.

"John was always an outgoing guy, an extrovert, full of gags," Baker said. 'I thought he would be a good host. I asked him about it.

Jones was willing. Just what kind of character he would portray was a detail yet to be determined when he got the job. "Bill King, the producer, and I considered different things," Jones recalled. "We thought about coverIng the doc's head with a blue fabric..But that didn't work. We even considered having a headless host." In his debut he wore a green-colored woman's stocking over his head.

Later he experimented with his wife's green eye makeup. Jones achieved the desired effect in hair makeup by merely wetting his hands in water and running them through his own naturally red hair.

"Around Halloween," he said, "women would call me at the station and ask where they could get a red fright wig like mine." In the show's beginning, "we started out being scary," he said. "But enough people told me the little ones didn't want to watch it that I said,'OK, I'll be a clown.'

'It's a Dog'
"I became a klutz. Whatever I touched, it went to hell. Like, I would hook up something electric and sparks would fly, or maybe a smoke bomb would go off." Jones wrote some of his own lines for the show, "but numerous people wrote for it," he said. "Everybody liked to write for it. Everybody wanted to be on it, too, as guests. Gene Leahy, the mayor, was on several times.

"Our audience was about half and half, adults and kids. We developed a 52 percent share of the audience for that time slot." Jones never hesitated to pin a turkey feather on a film if' a turkey it was. "We had a certain following who would be sure to watch a film if I told them just how bad it was," he said.

I had people call up and say that when I said a certain picture was the worst dog they would ever see, then they had to watch it. They'd say it really was as big a dog as I said it was." The ratings for "Creature Features'' began dropping when NBC introduced "Saturday Night Live" and insisted that KMTV take the show and air it at 10:30. That meant Dr. San Guinary would be bumped to midnight, thus losing a huge block of his audience. And that ultimately led to the show's cancellation.

"Owen Saddler, the station manager, called me in and said no one was sorrier than he was about that," Jones said. But he was between a rock and a hard place and had no choice, he said."

TV audiences may not have seen the last of the greenfaced doctor Jones said a return to the air one day "is possible, I think."