By John Dobberstein, Editor
If someone tried to find a photo that describes the life that 103-year-old William Jackson Cox has lived, the image of a globe would likely fit the bill.
Broken Arrow is only a final stop on a journey that has taken Cox across the U.S., from Kentucky to Ohio, to Nebraska, Maryland and Oklahoma, as well as overseas across Europe and the Middle East.
As the anniversary of the Korean Conflict’s ending approached this year, Cox was nestled quietly into a chair at his daughter Sherry’s home as he reflected about a remarkable life that saw him transform from a radio manager to career soldier to a prominent religious leader.
Cox recalls the late evening, after sharing American beer with the pastor of his church in England, that he decided to trade his military life and enter the ministry. This kicked off 3 years of Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va.
“It was just the inside feeling. That’s what I was supposed to do,” William says. “I just had a sense that I belonged in the ministry and I couldn’t get rid of it. It was just inside of me.”
A wide spot in the road
Life began for Cox and his family in eastern Kentucky. Cox was born in his grandparents’ log house in the deep country of Valeria, Ky. to Robert Lee and Ora Ethel Lawson Cox. The land is still being farmed and tended to today.
Even after moving away, Cox spent every summer working on the family’s Kentucky farm.
Life in rural Kentucky life created a close-knit family and many memories, but also tragedy. The countryside is replete with many old cemeteries, including the one where several generations of his family were laid to rest.
“It was sad. I found five little gravestones behind grandmother Lawson’s babies that hadn’t made it,” Cox’s daughter Sherry recalls. “Little children died. They couldn’t keep them alive.”
Pulling up roots
In 1929, Cox’s family sold their farm, hopped on a train and moved to Middletown, Ohio, when William was 5. His father and mother worked at a paper company.
Then World War II came along. Cox married Betty Drake on Dec. 20, 1941, 2 weeks after Pearl Harbor. They were married in the middle of a snowstorm.
“He went in to sign up for the service and they said, ‘Oh, your eyes are terrible. Forget it. We can’t give you a gun. And then they drafted him,” Sherry recalls. William was called up the following April of 1942.
Initially assigned to the Army Medical Corp. as a laboratory technician, Cox worked at Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver.
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“The Army took it over during the war. The techs would be assigned someplace for two months and someplace else for two months. And he never knew where he was going until he got there,” she says. “And then he’d write mom back home and say ‘Come’ and she’d rent a room and get a job as a secretary or something.”
Cox graduated as a 2nd lieutenant from officer training and was assigned to Supply and Logistics Division.
The next stop was in Atlanta, Ga. Cox’s wife had a job at Sears Roebuck filling orders and distributing them on an assembly line. As she and William were conversing about it he asked to come see it. He thought it was great and wrote a report to his commanding officer inviting him to see the assembly line.
“And the general was so impressed,” Sherry says, “they promoted him and sent him to the Pentagon. Wow. I mean, the Pentagon was brand new.”
William rose to the rank of captain after several assignments, eventually being selected as general staff at the Pentagon.
“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I didn’t know where I was,” William says of the Pentagon. His wife Betty was hired at the Veterans’ Administration and they spent the rest of World War II in Washington D.C.
The church beckons
When the war ended Cox was discharged with a recall provision. He gathered several friends and built a commercial AM radio station, KBRL in McCook, Neb. The station debuted Sept. 25, 1947 and remains on the air today.
It was in Nebraska where William’s connection with the church began. One year on Christmas Eve, a local Roman Catholic priest came by, as he did frequently, to have a cup of coffee and ‘chew the fat,’ and he asked William what he was doing that night.
William said he didn’t know, so the priest invited him to Christmas Eve mass, assuring him he would enjoy the experience.
“So the next guy that comes in to see him is the head of the Chamber of Commerce, and his name was Clarence Bible,” Sherry says. He also invited him to attend Christmas Eve mass, this one at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in McCook. He offered to come by and pick him up.
“So he went and it was really a life-changing experience. He’d never been in a liturgical church before. I mean, down in Kentucky, what have you got? You got a preacher passing through, and you got meeting on the grass with dinner on the grounds,” Sherry notes.
“That’s all the church you got. And so that was really a very, very moving experience.”
“It was the first time I ever got on my knees to pray,” William said.
William was recalled to the service as the Korean Conflict was gearing up.
He turned over the radio station to his partners and returned to his supply-and-logistics position at the Pentagon.
Cox and his family rented a quaint small house – really more of a summer rental — with a screened-in porch in Sylvan Shores, south of Annapolis. The house had no heat or insulation.
William commuted to the Pentagon every day, which was 1.5 hours just one way. Little did he know that a part of his history was along that drive – a colonial brick church called All Hallows, which had been there since 1693.
One day he stopped, knocked on the door of the rectory next door to the church. And old priest came to the door and William said, “Can I talked to you about the church?” The reverend obliged and they sat on a porch swing and talked for hours. Eventually the family got baptized there.
William had the opportunity to accept a position at the American Embassy in London, where he spent 3 years doing much of what he did before – managing the transport of supplies to field hospitals.
But his family also landed in Wimbledon, England, on St. Mary’s Road next to an old church built in the day of William and the Conquerors. The vicar at the church, on many nights would visit their home with his big dog to have chats with William. They lived in a fairly American house in a neighborhood full of ancient houses, with old-fashioned roofs and timber beams.
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The neighbors were friendly, especially Tina and Herbert, who let Sherry and her brother come inside and pound their hands on the piano.
One winter, the Coxes decided to make a snowman after a recent snowfall. “All the neighbors thought we were really crazy. They had never seen such a thing,” Sherry recalls.
When Elizabeth came to the throne, the family went to the coronation but didn’t get into Westminster Abbey. But the American Embassy was right on the parade route. They sat on the floor in the Embassy and had a picnic, taking turns looking out the windows.
“The gold coach came right past. I can still remember it. It was amazing,” Sherry says.
Coming together
After William was released from his assignment in Europe, he made good on his goal to enter the ministry. He resigned his Army commission as a major but continued in reserve as a lieutenant colonel.
Beginning in 1954 he spent 3 years with “professors of great stature” at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria to study for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, Sherry says.
William’s first assignment was to serve as a new deacon in Cumberland, Md., in the “narrows” between mountains in Appalachia. He did not land at Society Church, which was a tunneled building built on the site of George Washington’s British fort pre-revolution.
Cox instead was assigned to 2 tiny missions – one black, St. Phillps, and one white – on the opposite sides of the railroad and coal-mining town. William would conduct services at Holy Cross and then drive across town and do the same at St. Philips.
Apparently, something didn’t sit right with the situation. After some time had passed William led a movement to unite Holy Cross and St. Philip into one integrated church — The Church of the Holy Cross — with the fully blessing of his diocese.
William got full support from the area bishop, and not a single family out of either church was lost. The year was 1960, many years before racial strife would engulf cities across the U.S.
Bishop Powell, who was from Alabama, came out and said, “I don’t believe it,” William recalls. “And everyone got along. It was amazing. That was a God thing.”
‘The people’s candidate’
In 1972, during a convention to elect the next bishop for the sprawling Diocese of Maryland, it was also time to elect an assistant bishop.
Normally those who get elected were from the big cardinal parishes in Baltimore but Cox was the person chosen – a major shock for leaders in the diocese, especially for the new bishop.
“I don’t think he was exceptionally pleased. (William) was not his candidate. But (William) was the people’s candidate for sure,” Sherry says.
William was consecrated in Cumberland at a high school gymnasium, the biggest venue to be found. Even though there was a huge snowstorm that day, Sherry says, the gym was packed with well-wishers to watch the Bishop Harry Lee Doll do the honors.
During the ceremonies, William was carrying a shepherd staff with a rhododendron carved into the crook, made by a local wood carver in Kentucky.
Cox was assigned to live in Frederick, Md., halfway across the state, which would make visitation to congregations in western Maryland a little easier. For the next 8½ years, his typical Sunday morning consisted of the typical duties of a bishop: he baptized, taught, preached, confirmed and visited Sunday schools.
During that time he was also chaplain to the sisters at the covenant in Catonsville, Md., and Willian got to preach at the Basilica in Baltimore. Built in 1806, it’s the oldest cathedral in America.
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William made a few trips to Israel, but one trip was most memorable for a “Holy Spirit” moment, Sherry recalls. One evening, when William and their group had finished a pilgrimage and were talking about the day, someone asked the question, “Who needs to be prayed for,” and William said, “Pray for me. I need prayers.”
Being a bishop, he immediately began questioning what he’d just said. But the group gathered around and prayed for him, “and he was just overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit,” Sherry recalls.
When asked why he volunteered himself for prayer, William joked about it. “Probably, I was just trying to get them to move ahead. But they took me literally.”
But that moment changed his life, he adds. When William came back from the Holy Land and started going on his weekly parish visitations and confirming people, “people would just fall out in the Holy Spirit, I mean, all over the place. And it’s like he’d really been anointed,” Sherry says.
“That’s not a very secular thing to say, but when it happens, it happens. And it happened. And the head bishop wasn’t very pleased. (William) was upsetting the status quo.”
Heading out west
There are always plenty of meetings to attend as a bishop, but at one of those seemingly routine meetings in 1980, William was offered a job that would become the next opportunity in his journey.
Bishop Gerry McAllister told William he needed help and asked if he’d come out to Oklahoma to be his assistant. Intrigued by the new opportunity and a chance to get away from politics in the Diocese of Maryland that was wearing him down, William accepted.
“It was exciting to me because I had never been out there as a bishop. And so I went and I was glad I did and it was a new experience,” William said.
His office and headquarters was at Trinity Church in Tulsa. Parishioners planted a tree for him when he started his duties, and William and his wife became good friends with McAllister’s family.
Being such a world traveler, how did William feel about Oklahoma when he came?
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“You know something, the people in Oklahoma have been so nice to us. I love Oklahoma for that reason. It’s the people,” he says.
There was plenty of travel, and eventually he decided driving to the Oklahoma panhandle was getting pretty tiring. So he decided to learn how to fly.
After training to become a commercial pilot, William, 61, took his first solo flight in 1982. He continued to fly for 20 years.
Flying is something William still misses. He feels that emotion every time he hears a plane overhead.
“What I like most about it is the joy of getting in the airplane and taking off and being able to soar around wherever you want to go. You see the world from a different perspective,” he says.
Not long after, William retired – “allegedly” – his daughter says. “That’s when he really got started, because now he was free to be asked to go here, there and everywhere. And people did.
“He got invited to come and do teaching and healing missions all over the world, literally. Malaysia, Singapore. Europe. North Africa.”
The bishop of Texas eventually asked William to come and be assistant bishop in Texas for him, which he did for 3 years at St. Matthew’s Church in Austin.
Signs of trouble
Inevitably, politics began to seep more and more into churches, which happened to the Episcopal Church over issues such as homosexuality and female priests.
The Bishop of Kenya asked Cox to go up to Kansas and do some confirmations and ordinations for a congregation that had left the Episcopal church and joined the Anglican Church.
William “got into a whole heap of trouble” with the Episcopal Bishop of Kansas, Sherry says, but the 86-year-old William reminded him that church had left the Episcopal Church. The bishop didn’t see it that way.
“Things got from bad to worse to terrible. And he actually got brought up on charges and got kicked out,” Sherry recalls.
In spite of that, the Anglican Archbishop of The Southern Cone, Argentina, offered him ecclesiastical residence as part of the Worldwide Anglican Communion. Bishop Cox was instrumental in founding the Anglican Church of the Holy Spirit-Tulsa, where he remains a member.
Bishop Cox continued in ministry as requested for some years after his wife Betty died in November 2009. He resided at St. Simeon’s Community in Tulsa with his youngest son, Michael.
Upon Michael’s death in 2020, he moved to Broken Arrow with Sherry and son-in-law Tom Murphy. His other son, William Richard Cox (Bix) lives with his family in Louisville, Ky.
Cox readily agrees his time serving Christ defined his life, and the church served as a guiding hand and inspiration no matter where he lived.
“You have to give in to wherever you are. That’s the way I look at it,” Cox says. “And I’ve always found a home wherever I’ve been in the church.”
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