YEAR LATER, A LOOK AT LINE’S ENDS

Exactly one year ago today Amy Sherwood and Bill Jones held Hands Across America. Not each other’s, exactly.

But they were linked nonetheless in that they stood at either end of the 4,000-mile line of 5.6 million people who participated in the mega-event.

Today, Amy is a budding Brooklyn TV starlet and Bill is unemployed in Idaho.

The 6-year-old moppet and the 35-year-old down-on-his-luck father of five who anchored either end of the Hands Across America line had little in common outside the fact that they were both homeless on May 25, 1986. They were arbitrarily plucked out of relief shelters in New York and Long Beach to symbolize the Hands cause: fighting homelessness.

Amy stood at the head of the Hands line in Manhattan’s Battery Park. Bill Jones stood with his wife, Mary, and their family at the end of the line, at the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

One year later, about all that they have in common is that neither will be returning to the respective scenes of their fleeting national fame to commemorate the first anniversary of Hands Across America on Memorial Day observations.

According to Lucy Silver, Amy’s booking agent, the girl is living quietly in a Brooklyn apartment with her mother, Jean, and her five brothers and sisters. Technically, the family was not homeless at the time of Hands Across America because they had moved into the apartment two weeks before May 25, 1986. When Hands promoters went looking for a symbolic family to stand at the head of the line in early May, they found the Sherwoods at a New York shelter hotel.

On the strength of Amy’s instant notoriety, vivaciousness and precociousness, she was signed by the Kronick & Kelly talent agency and began going on television auditions even before the day of the event.

Silver said that Amy has appeared in a nationally broadcast television commercial for Kachoos tissues and an episode of the CBS sitcom “Kate and Allie” this past year. The rest of the time, she has been quietly attending elementary school in Brooklyn.

“She’s trying to be a normal kid as much as possible,” Silver said.

The Jones family has not been so fortunate.

Found by Hands promoters living at the Long Beach Family Shelter for the Homeless, Bill and Mary Jones were offered jobs, food and a $1,000 subsidy on an apartment in Torrance following their televised appearance at the Pacific end of the line.

Jones accepted one job offer but quit within a few weeks of the Hands Across America event, bought bus tickets for himself and his family with a portion of the $1,000 Torrance apartment subsidy and left for Spokane, Wash.

There, they moved into a motel and the Spokane Chronicle published a story about them under the headline, “Homeless, Jobless Family Turns to Spokane.” Jones told the newspaper that he had come to Washington because he had a lifelong ambition to hunt elk.

Donations and job offers generated by the newspaper story were passed on to the Joneses, according to Chronicle columnist Doug Clark. At that point, Clark began a series of articles about the Joneses that he entitled “Jones Across America.”

By August, the Joneses were on the move again--this time to Post Falls, Ida., where they lived in a trailer given to them rent-free by a sympathetic local resident. In November, the family moved to Kellogg, Ida., where they located in a financially depressed mining region known as the Silver Valley.

Several agencies that aid the homeless, including St. Rita’s Catholic Charities and the St. Vincent de Paul Society, helped the Joneses through the winter. According to “Bones” Davis, an official with one Kellogg shelter that helped the Jones family, Bill Jones remained unemployed. In February, the Joneses decided “to take instruction in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Davis said.

Since then, he said, the family has continued to live in the area and has come to rely on the Mormon Church for food and shelter.