Chancellor Tony Childress is a judge by day and a volunteer firefighter when community needs arise- a service he has provided for 25 years. On December 26, 2025, Chancellor Childress was with friends hunting in a duck blind when he received a text from the Bogata Volunteer Fire Department to assist a woman in active labor.
“My brother saw it first and when we first read it, we thought it meant that somebody had delivered a baby to the post office, like a safe baby situation, and my brother said you need to get there. My truck was parked about 300 yards away and I took off running.”
Chancellor Childress was the first firefighter on the scene. The mother had delivered her baby in the back seat of a car pulled over off the side of the road.
"There was a lady standing there, turned out to be the young lady’s mother,” he said. “She was standing there talking to 911. She asked me, ‘Is everything going to be ok?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, everything’s going to be fine.’ When you’re the person that people are looking at to be calm, you’ve got to portray calmness.”
He walked to the other side of the car to check on the mother and her baby.
“I asked her how she was. She said, fine. I asked her if she was hurting. She said, not much. What I was trying to do was to see if she was alert. I checked her out to make sure her eyes were focused. She was breathing real calm.”
That’s when his attention turned to the baby.
"About the time I was about to touch it, the baby looked kind of gray, it took a deep breath, and it took another one. And then I saw the baby stick its tongue out.”
A moment later, a firefighter arrived with medical towels and a first aid kit.
“We opened the car back up and wrapped the baby in those,” he said. “He got on the passenger side, and I got on the driver’s side. We got a towel up and under the baby, so she wasn’t sitting on her mother’s leg and then we prayed for the ambulance to get there.”
Once it arrived, Chancellor Childress assisted with getting the mother and baby out of the car and onto the gurney.
“To be honest with you, I didn’t realize how nervous I was until it was over,” he said.
Chancellor Childress stopped by the hospital later that day to make sure the woman and her baby girl were doing well.
“A lot of times, when you’re a firefighter, or at least a volunteer, most of the time when you get called out somebody’s not having a good day. Their house is on fire. They’ve had a wreck. This was a good thing, but it could have gone sideways just happened to be there.”
Chancellor Childress has always felt strongly about service.
“I was a volunteer firefighter before I was a judge,” he said. “I just said that’s not one of the things I’m going to give up. I believe in serving the community in whatever capacity you can. Judges ought to serve their communities in more roles than just being a judge. If you’re a leader, and judges are leaders, at some point you need to lead if you can do something. That’s why I keep doing it.”
