SMITHFIELD - The late "Deacon" Jones was a notorious overtipper with a soft spot for preachers and a certain mangey dog. He was also a hard bargainer who would never let you down, his friends said during Jones' funeral Thursday night.

" 'Deacon' was a giver," Wayne Swearinger, a longtime friend, told an audience of some 1,000 people gathered in the auditorium at Johnston Community College.

Kenneth Bobby "Deacon" Jones, founder of the Deacon Jones Auto Group, used the success of his business to support charities, and he would go out of his way to provide vehicles for those he thought were truly in need, the speakers said.

Jones was an "iron fist in a silk glove," Dr. Gene Rice said during the eulogy. "There was a firmness about him, but there was a tenderness, a tenderness about him."

In dozens of memorial pictures, projected and framed, Jones smiled earnestly. The funeral speakers said he drew real joy from church and family and that he sometimes surged with spontaneous outbursts of faith.

At church, he would often shout "Sing it again! Let's sing it again!" no matter what the program had planned, said the Rev. Kelvin Page.

Jones loved golf, too, and played on courses far and wide. "He who has the fastest cart wins" was his motto, Swearinger said.

Fishing wasn't his forte, though. He was too impatient, said the Rev. O. Wayne Chambers.

And in life, he was a perpetual bargainer, forever whittling from $10,000 to $9,800. But in the days after his Christmas heart attack, he wanted no deals and expected no miracles, his friends said.

As he lay in a hospital, dozens of friends and relatives streamed to visit him. At his funeral, more than 50 wreaths and floral arrangements adorned the hall outside the auditorium, and the stage was covered in blooming flora.

In his eulogy, Rice painted a picture of a man whose character shone in simple ways. One of Jones' true loves, said Rice, was No-Name, a scraggly, mangey, blistered dog that Jones and his family nurtured to health.

Eventually, No-Name lived in a miniature replica of the Joneses' house and drank the milk that "Deacon" warmed.

Once, Rice said, he saw Jones comfort the dog for hours on end when it was spooked in a way that it just couldn't shake.

"All of a sudden, I saw the heart of a man," he said.