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Partly cloudy. High 82F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..
Partly cloudy skies. Low near 60F. Winds light and variable.
Dr. Jim Citty, team physician for Harding University, will be remembered Saturday at 11 a.m. in the Huckeba Field House. Citty died Monday, one day before he would have turned 83.
Dr. Jim Citty came to Searcy in 1957 to attend Harding University and play basketball. “I really think looking back, it was probably providential,” he said in 2019. “I think it was God moving in a way I didn’t really understand at the time.” He became the university’s team physician in 1975.
Dr. Jim Citty, team physician for Harding University, will be remembered Saturday at 11 a.m. in the Huckeba Field House. Citty died Monday, one day before he would have turned 83.
Dr. Jim Citty came to Searcy in 1957 to attend Harding University and play basketball. “I really think looking back, it was probably providential,” he said in 2019. “I think it was God moving in a way I didn’t really understand at the time.” He became the university’s team physician in 1975.
It seems like practically everyone in Searcy knew Dr. Jim Citty or was delivered by him.
According to Unity Health, the longtime Searcy physician who died Monday, the day before he would have turned 83, delivered more than 10,000 babies. A memorial service will be held for Citty on Saturday at 11 a.m. in the Huckeba Field House at Harding University, where he served as team physician.
“Dr. Citty was a larger-than-life figure to those that knew and loved him,” Harding head football coach Paul Simmons said. “He was strong, he was steady and he lived a life of great faithfulness.
“It is impossible to know how many thousands of lives were touched by the gentle hands of Doc. There will never be another one like Dr. Citty – ever. The loss is tremendous.”
On the university’s Facebook page, it posted, “We are saddened by the passing of our beloved team physician ... . A 1961 alumnus, Dr. Citty was a member of the first football team upon its return in 1959 and has served the Bisons as team doctor since 1975. Our deepest sympathy goes to his wife, Maralyn, and children, daughter Kellee Blickenstaff and sons Kent, Kris and Kyle, and the entire Citty and Blickenstaff families. The family requests memorials be made to Sunshine School or the Harding sports football program.”
According to Citty, he was asked by his preacher to visit Searcy and look at Harding College before he decided to attend the university. “I don’t know how to explain it; it just felt right to me,” Citty told The Daily Citizen in 2019. “And I really think looking back, it was probably providential. I think it was God moving in a way I didn’t really understand at the time.”
Citty moved to Searcy in 1957 from Idabel, Okla., to play basketball at Harding. “I took $25, which was all I had that summer hauling hay, and that’s all it took to register at Harding.” He said his idea “had always been, I’ll play sports at Harding then graduate and teach English in Idabel and coach football.”
Citty’s wife encouraged him to do something professionally, and one of his teammates in basketball had applied for medical school at the university of Tennessee, so Citty followed in his footsteps and was accepted. “It was a providential thing because I don’t come from a line of doctors,” he said “We don’t have that heritage. I didn’t know if I could do it or not; all I knew was I was going to try.”
After graduating from medical school in four years, Citty spent three years in the military. “I went into the Army because the physician draft was on at the time for Vietnam and I thought, ‘They’re going to draft me anyway in a couple of years, so I may as well go in,’ so I went in for my internship training in the U.S. military,” he said. “Those dates were the heating up of the Vietnam War. That was our era of time.”
Not wanting to keep his family constantly moving, Citty was given a discharge from the military in 1968 and moved to southwest Arkansas, close to Idabel. He lived there for seven years before accepting a position at Harding as the football team’s physician.
Citty said that back when he was a student, he didn’t know much about Searcy as a community. “Campus was closed; we couldn’t go anywhere with girls in a car except on special outings to Petit Jean and places like that. We very seldom got out into the community,” he said.
“There was one night that we could go out to the Rialto following a prescribed route, and we walked from campus to the Rialto. Most people coming through Harding at that time didn’t really get a feel for what Searcy was.”
When he moved back in 1975 and experienced “becoming a citizen of the community,” Searcy was “a changed atmosphere” to him.
“Searcy’s a great community to live in,” he said. “If you look around America and say, ‘I’m looking for a place that has good values and good education, good recreation,’ then Searcy, Ark., is the place to be. It’s not exactly the center of the universe, but it gets close.”
Several members of the community spoke this week about Citty as a doctor and as a person.
White County Sheriff Phillip Miller said Citty conducted his last two or three flight physicals he is required to have yearly as a pilot. “He had just done my flight physical about three weeks or a month ago,” Miller said. “Super nice guy, always interested in you as a person and not just a patient. Of course, his son, Kyle, delivered my youngest two children. Just an all-around great family and great family man.”
Searcy Mayor Kyle Osborne posted on the city of Searcy Facebook page that “we are saddened by the loss of Dr. Jim Citty. He has done so much for our community and we are so thankful for his dedication to caring for so many in Searcy. I want to extend my sympathy to his entire family during this difficult time.”
Former Searcy Mayor David Morris, a City Council member, said Citty “was one of the most kind and caring men that I have ever known. Not only was he a superb and compassionate physician, but he was bigger than life in so many other dimensions. I specifically recall how grateful and humble he was when he was honored for his many years of service to the medical community.”
“Serving as mayor of Searcy at the time, it was my privilege to present Dr. Citty with the key to the city and to proclaim the day Dr. Jim Citty Appreciation Day in Searcy in recognition and honor for his many years of service to our community,” Morris said. “He told me on many occasions afterwards how touched and appreciative he was of this recognition. We know that he is now in the arms of our heavenly Father, the Great Physician, and he will truly be missed by al of us.”
On behalf of Unity Health, interim President/CEO Ray Montgomery said, “We want to offer our most sincere condolences to the family of Dr. Jim Citty. May God bring peace and comfort through His promises. At Unity Health, ‘Big Daddy,’ as his family endearingly called him, was much more than a physician. He was a mentor, a faithful friend and a pillar in our community. Dr. Citty’s absence on earth is painful to us but we know he’s rejoicing today.”
Searcy resident DJ Jones said he knew of Citty because “my grandmother and mother used him as their doctor all their entire life 40, 50 years going to him and just seeing him at the school and always on the sideline and always at the high school games.” He said Citty “just hardly never” missed “a sporting event for his grandkids, and some of his grandkids are friends with my kids. Literally, his grandkids being the example that you want your kids to act like.”
He mentioned that the Cittys raised their children to be “kind of the example that most people, a lot of people in Searcy, want their kids to grow up and be like them and act like them and behave and work like they do.
“Everybody knew him [Citty] and everybody is going to miss him,” Jones said. “Now that everybody is kind of reflecting on the life that he led, hopefully a lot of us will look inward and try to fill in some of that void by doing and acting the way he would and the way he did and hopefully, even though we lost one man, hopefully by us reflecting on his memory, we actually replace him by more good and more Christian attitudes.”
Liz Culp Howell, who retired from Harding University with 25 years of service and is a Searcy realtor, said she had known Citty since she was 11 years old, living in De Queen.
“Jim Citty and his family moved there to practice at the local hospital and he was a member of the Church of Christ and we were too, so when they came in, they took over as volunteer youth minister leaders and they took us to youth rallies,” Howell said. “They took us to Harding, of course, and that’s how I fell in love with Harding is through the Cittys.
“And he had a private plane and he took us to the airport and we would cook hamburgers and he would take us up to have a plane ride, so he has been the same since I was 11 until the day he died.”
Howells said she thinks she and her granddaughter were Citty’s “last patients. We got to see him and he was just the same, willing to help, just a wonderful person till the end. He delivered two of my grandchildren and they remained close to him and, of course, me working at Harding.”
“He was always involved with the Bison football and he was very instrumental when the Bisons came back in 1959 of supporting the scoreboard,” she said. “... This has been a dear friend. He came from rural Oklahoma and when he came to Harding, the only thing he had were the shirts that he had gotten for graduation and one pair of jeans, and he would wash those out so he would have something to wear.
“He came from a very rural area. His dad was killed when he was very young so he was raised by a single mom. His dad was in the oil field and died in a car accident. Dr. Citty and his sister, Sylvia, were the only two children from that marriage and his mother remarried. She worked as a switchboard operator and supported the kids.”
Howell said a lot of people knew the Cittys from Camp Wyldewood.
“They just were very rural country people, and he stayed that way,” she said. “He never lost his roots and he always had a heart to help people and it didn’t matter who it was. He helped me. He helped people he didn’t even know but he would help do stuff that they were not able to have done.”
In 2021, Citty was selected of the grand marshal for the city’s Holiday of Lights parade. “The committee said it has to be someone who has been front line with all this COVID stuff. It’s got to be someone in health care, so I said it should be Dr. Citty and they were like, ‘Oh, he would be great!’
“We had to go against Bison football [at the time the parade was scheduled for] and so the Bisons are in the playoffs for football and so he said, ‘I’ll do it unless the Bisons are still in the playoffs,’” she said.
“When I asked him, he said he would and sent me a funny picture of how he could dress and stuff like that. We do a Holiday of Lights Facebook page and we get maybe 300 likes for something. When we posted that Dr. Citty is grand marshal, he gets 10,000 likes, and he had delivered over 10,000 babies during his career. A lot of people who were there at the parade were people he had delivered. So I said, ‘I think all 10,000 of them came to the parade.’ He looked so happy. It was the biggest Holiday of Lights parade. Look at the number of likes! It was more than 22,000.”
Howell said Citty “was dearly loved, the real, real, true Christian doctor who took care of patients and didn’t let other things get in the way. More than anything, I loved him with all my heart.”
The community also lost another longtime doctor May 16, Dr. John Elliott Bell, who was known as J Bell and helped bring the first CARTI facility outside of Little Rock to Searcy.
Morris said Bell was “a gentle giant in the formation of the medical community as we know it today in Searcy and the surrounding area.
“As it was so eloquently stated in his obituary, he, along with other upcoming physicians shaped the future of medical care for our area,” Morris said. “I recall back when I worked for White County Memorial Hospital [now Unity Health-White County Medical Center] that the leftover homemade pies were always in the cafeteria counter after lunch. Each afternoon, Dr. Bell, along with other physicians, would take a break and we would meet in the cafeteria for coffee and pie.
“In order to briefly get away from the stresses of the day, the conversations would always be centered around our families, our outdoor interests, and mostly [Arkansas] Razorback athletics. Dr. Bell was always at the center of these discussions. Later on, I got to know ‘J’ more on a personal basis and considered him a very close and faithful friend. Although we will miss his kindness and gentle smile, we rest assured that he now sees Jesus face-to-face.”
Bell, also a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and a fellow of the American College of Radiology, was appointed by then-Gov. Bill Clinton to the state Medical Board and served for 15 years. When then-Gov. Mike Beebe called to reappoint him again, Bell told him he had been honored to serve as long as he had and asked the governor to appoint Citty to replace him, which the governor did. Bell served also in the Arkansas Army National Guard, retiring as a captain.
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