Becoming a sports celebrity by accident

Even with all the work that had to be done on the family farm, Childress found time to play sports in high school, mainly basketball. Childress said he also had time to play some baseball, but basketball was his favorite.

Perhaps the fondest memory Childress has of his years at Porter High School are the last two games he played with his basketball team against Coweta. At that time, Childress said, Porter and Coweta were fierce competitors with a history of rivalry.

“They had a couple of really good players,” Childress said of the Coweta team. “But we were able to beat Coweta the last game of my junior year and the first game of my senior year — that was great to get to beat Coweta the last two times we played them.”

Childress’ interest in basketball didn’t wane after his high school graduation. He joined a team made up of some of his fellow Douglas Aircraft Co. employees.

“Back then they had teams from all the big companies,” Childress said. “I think I was the only one — other than one of those old boys who played for Coweta — who hadn’t played college ball.”

The talent on the Douglas Aircraft team, Childress said, won 67 games in a row, earning it an invitation to play at the national tournament that year in Clinton, Ind. Childress said it was a tremendous opportunity for him and team, but he came back to Oklahoma that year with a little more star power than he had when he left.

Childress said he was ticketed for running a stop sign the first morning of the tournament. He thought all kinds of terrible things would happen, but all he had to do was pay a $5 fine and some court costs. The surprise, Childress said, came the next morning when he read the newspaper

“Here’s what came out in the paper the next morning: ‘Jim Childress, former All American basketball player from Oklahoma University,’” Childress said with a laugh. “I guess they were just trying to get a little publicity for their town, but I carried that article around for years until I wore it out.”

It was just time to come back home

After serving some time in the military, Childress moved to Muskogee, where he stepped into a career as a salesman.

Childress learned rather quickly that he didn’t want to sell classified ads for the newspaper. But the connections he made with a number of local car dealerships while doing that opened a door for his opportunity to sell cars.

“I found out I could do that, so I moved to Tulsa and went to work up there for this outfit that had dealerships all over the country,” Childress said. “They would open up a dealership here or buy another one there, and they would send me different places.”

While working at the company’s Norman dealership, Childress did so well selling cars the company sent him and his wife at the time to Hawaii for an all-expenses-paid, one-week vacation.