Jackson Family

• Obie Jackson Sr.jpg

Obadiah “Obie” Jackson, born in Crockett, Texas, in 1936, came to the Chandler area in 1940 with his parents, Lewis Douglas “L.D.” and Daisy Mae Jackson, and his grandparents Jim and Amanda Phillips-Jackson. Amanda and Daisy Mae were both school teachers.  Obadiah’s parents married in the early 1930s and had their first son, Horace, in 1935 and Obadiah in 1936.  When they came to Chandler in 1940, they lived in a tent in the desert until L.D. began to work irrigating the Goodson Farm off of Chandler Heights Road.  Daisy Mae drove their Hudson to Harmon Library on 7^th Avenue and Buckeye Road to work as a librarian and teacher every day.  Obie’s mother died from childbirth complications when he was five years old.  He then lived with his grandparents on Clyde Neely’s ranch on Cooper and Elliot Road from 1940-1948.

During this time the house burned down when Obie was around 9 years old.  The family moved to Phoenix and lived with Aunt Pinky (Jackson) Willis, who was Amanda’s oldest daughter, until the house was rebuilt in Gilbert.  Obie was baptized in Phoenix under the leadership of Bishop Clark Sr. and Aunt Pinky was the mother of this church.  When the house was rebuilt on Gilbert and Cooper Road, he was about 10 years old. He would walk from Gilbert to Arizona Avenue to catch the Greyhound Bus. He attended a Church of God in Christ on Morales. His father would bring him to the Blue Front Café on Saragosa Street and Ethel Lee Jones, the owner of the café, would watch over him. 

During that time he visited Aunt Emma (Jackson) Arbuckle. He would buy lunch at Harris and Lee Barbecue which was on the west side of Arizona Avenue next to Po Boy’s gas station. He would take his lunch to Aunt Emma’s house to eat it. While visiting her he would see Zora Bell Folley and James Walter Arbuckle. They would put boxing gloves on and spar for hours at a time. Jimmy was very fast with his hands although he was small in stature.  He could pick 500 pounds of cotton per day. He went to the service, was wounded and came back disabled, but he and Zora were both very competitive and trained every Sunday.

Obie’s father died when he was 12 years old and in 1949, his grandparents moved Obie and Horace to Southside, where they lived on Delaware Street.  Obie recalls their home:  “It wasn’t very much of a house…when we bought the house, it had three rooms.  It was an old house, and we had to put it together.” Their floor was concrete, and they had running water after the sewer line was put in.  After his grandmother passed away when he was 13 years old, Obie’s Aunt Emma (Jackson) Arbuckle, Aunt Hazel, Aunt Josephine Jackson, and Aunt Evelyn all contributed to his growing up. Aunt Emma took charge of his life after his grandmother’s passing. Obie credits his Aunt Emma with curing him from double pneumonia. During this time his brother, Horace, had enlisted in the service and was a Paratrooper. He later got his doctorate and became a teacher. Dr. Horace Jackson is now retired and lives in Riverside, California. Horace has four children.

Obadiah was friends with the Turner and Payne children. Obie attended Booker T. Washington Elementary School in Mesa, and Chandler High School.  He played football in high school and married Charletta Jones in 1956.  They lived in Southside until 1974 and have five children.  The Jacksons now live in Phoenix and Obie runs his own real estate business.

• Obie Jackson Family.jpg

Obie recalls his family boiling a lot of their food because they lived out in the country; they had a wood stove.  Yet, “Sometimes, on Sundays, we’d fry because of fried chicken and stuff like that.”  Red beans, rice and cream style corn were usually served with the chicken.  The Jacksons would do their shopping at Liberty Market in Gilbert.  They had their own chickens and pigs, and Amanda made homemade sausage.  There used to be a lot of catfish in the canal off of Cooper and Elliot Roads, and Amanda would cook them in a pressure cooker.