About "Poet Bill"
The author, William "Poet Bill" Childers, was born in Anniston, Alabama in 1931. The Childers’ clan, mom, dad, big (and only) brother Lewis moved to Dallas, Texas in 1939 via a one year stop-over in Wilson, North Carolina. It was a new life, very busy for a young country boy. Bill graduated from high school in 1948.
Bill joined the United States Marine Corps in 1951, serving in the Korean war as a gunner on an M-46 Marine Tank. His tank was severely damaged by a North Korean land mine, but the crew sustained no serious wounds. He returned to California in 1952, and completed his Marine duty as a Staff Sergeant, prior to release to inactive duty in 1954.
Bill felt the call to the ministry in the Methodist Church, attending SMU and their school of theology. He then returned to active duty as an ordained Methodist Minister, and a LTjg in the United States Navy. During his twenty-one years of service in the Navy, he spent one year in Vietnam, 1968-69 as a Chaplain with the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines. He retired in 1982 from the Navy as a Lt Cdr, and returned home as a Staff Member of the First United Methodist Church in Dallas. He retired from the United Methodist Church in 1996.
Bill worked as a Hearing Officer for the City of Dallas for eleven years where he began writing his first book, Integrity of The Spirit, Escaping The Mind-Game! which was completed and published in 2004. Bill, who also serves as a precinct chaplain for the Dallas Police Department, has never stopped writing the poetry he loves, continuing what had begun as that fourteen year old in the shadow of WWII. Perhaps many poetry lovers might debate much of those first efforts being tagged as ’poetry’, but they were at least ’efforts’. They were the beginning, and he has been writing ever since.
Bill was working on a new book of poetry, tentatively titled Leaves from the Acorn Tree, but health issues have delayed this project, so he graciously loaned us his manuscripts for uploading the poems on our website instead.
Bill and his wife Tommie, along with three of their children and five grand-children, live in Dallas and the surrounding area. He also has a son, an auditor for the state of Nevada who lives with his wife and two children in Las Vegas.