Jim Childress is an Arkansawyer who became an Okie when he was just 12 years. old.

The 72-year-old Muskogee resident moved with his family from Bigelow, Ark., a small town alongside the Arkansas River about 40 miles northwest of Little Rock, to the Choska Bottoms near Porter during the late 1940s.

After Childress graduated from Porter High School, where he played basketball and other sports, he went to work in the aerospace industry. He worked for Douglas Aircraft Co. in Tulsa before joining the armed services, getting out and moving to Muskogee, where he decided to try his hand as a salesman.

After a short stint selling classified advertising for the Muskogee Phoenix, Childress said he ventured into car sales. After getting a feel for the business in Muskogee, Childress went to work in Tulsa.

“I went out to conquer the world,” Childress said of his years as a car salesman. “After I did that, I came back to Muskogee — I’ve always loved it here.”

Better opportunities brought Childress family to Oklahoma

Jim Childress grew up as one of three sons of an Arkansas farming family.

He remembers the clear streams in which he used to fish and the pine trees that towered above the landscape of Ouachita National Forest just east of his childhood home in Bigelow, Ark.

“It’s just small town,” Childress said of his hometown where his grandfather worked as a blacksmith. “But man, those pine trees were big and the streams were clear — fishing and swimming was great.”

At age 12, Childress had to trade in those spring-fed Arkansas streams for muddy Oklahoma farm ponds at age 12, when his parents pulled up roots and moved to Porter. Childress said the move came on the heels of similar moves made by other relatives.

“It was just a bunch of family following family,” Childress said about his parents’ decision to move to Oklahoma. “They were all looking for better opportunities.”

As a son of a farmer, Childress said he did his fair share of picking and chopping cotton on the family farm in the Choska Bottoms, an area where Childress says you can “grow just about anything.”

“Of course, we had a tractor,” Childress said. “That was a real treat to get to drive that — we’d start out on those quarter- or half-mile rows, and when you’d get to the end you’d have to turn around and come back.”