The actor considers his grandfather a particular hero of his but also recalls a high school teacher named Professor Crouch who discovered that Jones had a stutter. "He questioned me about why, if I loved words so much, couldn't I say them out loud?" Jones wrote. "One day I showed him a poem I had written, and he responded to it by saying that it was too good to be my own work, that I must have copied it from someone. To prove that I hadn't plagiarized it, he wanted me to recite the poem, by heart, in front of the entire class. I did as he asked, got through it without stuttering.... my confidence grew as I learned to express myself comfortably out loud."
