During his 21-year career at the former Van Atkins department stores, Charles Covington worked his way up from sweeping floors to managing stores and buying merchandise for every department for multiple stores. Several times a year, he would travel to New York City, where he dined at all kinds of restaurants and saw shows.
During those trips, he rubbed shoulders with celebrities such as Michael Douglas, Lily Tomlin, Adam West and Ron Howard.
“One night, I went to a show and sat next to Geraldo Rivera, but it was dark, and I didn’t realize it. I looked past him, and there was a girl, and then there was Cheech Marin. During a break, I said to Geraldo Rivera, ‘Isn’t that guy Cheech?’ Then I said, ‘Wait a minute, you’re Geraldo Rivera!’ They were real nice, though,” he added.
Photos of the celebrities he’s met, along with their autographs, hang on the wall behind Covington’s desk like a larger-than-life scrapbook.
“The only one that’s valuable is Helen Hayes; she never gave an autograph, they say. The night I saw her and asked her for that, she said, ‘Oh, why don’t you people collect cigars or something?’” Covington recalled.
“We’ve been so blessed, been around the world and got to do and see a lot of things,” he said.
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Outside of owning Batesville Furniture and other businesses in and around the city, Covington, 63, is involved in his church and community. This coming year, he will celebrate his 40th year in the Kiwanis Club, a global organization of volunteers who support children of all ages, from elementary school through college. The Batesville Kiwanis Club sponsors local organizations at every age level and sponsors the Kiwanis Youth Football League for third- through sixth-graders, as well as cheerleading for first- through sixth-graders and a reading program for all preschool and kindergarten classes, plus the Special Olympics.
“Dr. Franklin Williams, a dentist downtown, invited me to come to Kiwanis,” Covington said. “It’s just a good way to get involved. Our emphasis is all about youth, and I had been a youth director at a church, my wife taught school for 13 years, and her father was a school superintendent. We love kids.”
Covington said he started in the Batesville club, but his schedule was hectic, so when a club started at Southside that would meet for breakfast instead of lunch, he moved his membership to that one and was actually the first president of the club.
“That was in the early 1990s,” he said. “We met at Spah Grill, which was then the Scenic View Restaurant.”
Covington eventually moved back to the Batesville club and was president for the club’s 75th anniversary.
“I agreed to get back in line for the presidency. Three years ago, I thought, ‘Well, that’s three years down the road,’ but it starts slipping up on you,” he said, chuckling.
He said the Kiwanis just finished up the club’s football season, and it’s a great way for the younger kids to start learning fundamentals, not only for football, but also cheerleading for those who participate in that activity as well.
At one time, the Kiwanis operated the city swimming pool, he said, and now the club sponsors the Every Child a Swimmer project to ensure that children are trained in water safety. Since the late 1980s, the project has given basic swimming lessons to thousands of children in Independence County, according to club information.
Covington has, over the years, also served on the Old Independence Regional Museum and Batesville Area Chamber of Commerce boards of directors, as well as on the chamber’s Retail Committee, which was charged with finding more ways to bring people into Batesville to shop.
He has also been involved in state and national boards. Covington is a past president of the Arkansas Home Furnishings Association, and about 25 years ago, he was one of the charter members of the Mega Buying Group, which merged with the Nationwide Buying Group, which has about 4,500 store members nationally. He is a current board member of the Nationwide group.
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Covington was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He has a younger brother, Roger. Their parents, Travis and JoAnn Covington, were originally from the Searcy-Judsonia area but moved up north for a few years to work in the fruit orchards, but when Charles Covington was 10, the family moved back to Batesville.
His first job was at Van Atkins.
“I started working for them in 1972, when they moved from their location downtown, where Autry’s is now, to the building [Van Atkins] built in the Town Plaza Shopping Center. That was one of [Batesville’s] first shopping centers,” Covington said.
Covington was a senior at Batesville High School when he met his future wife, Robin, who was a junior at Southside. She was working at KFC, and he came in for lunch one day.
“She was there and took my order, then came over and wiped my table. Her first words to me were, ‘You sure are messy.’ I’ve proved that through the years,” he said, laughing, “but it was love at first sight.”
The two dated, even after Covington graduated from high school in 1974 and attended the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
After a year, he returned to Batesville, and he and Robin both attended Arkansas College (now Lyon College), and both sang in the college’s group the Lassies and Lads, which traveled around the country and performed USO-type shows for the military.
The couple married in 1976, and he was managing Van Atkins. They live in Rosie, on 80 acres, just 7 miles from Batesville, where Robin’s family settled more than 200 years ago.
The couple have two sons. Brad, who works at Bad Boy Mowers, and his wife, Jessie, have a 14-year-old daughter, Victoria. Victoria is an artist and sells her paintings all over the country, Covington said.
“With her money, she has bought 7 acres at Rosie, and she’s going to put a double wide on it and become a landlord, following in her dad’s and my footsteps,” Covington said.
Their other son, John, owns Covington Home Improvement and is married to Ashley. They have two children, Coy and Ava, who are in the second and fourth graded, respectively, at Southside.
In 1993, the owners sold the Van Atkins stores, and Covington had an opportunity to move into a different type of retail. Johnny Mitchum had bought Batesville Furniture and wanted Covington to buy it from him.
“I said, ‘Johnny, I don’t know anything about the furniture business, but I’ll agree to run it for a year with an option to buy, and boy, it didn’t take me 30 days to realize I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Covington said. “It’s still retail, but in the clothing business, you have the four S’s: sizes, styles, seasons and shoplifting. Furniture is a one-size-fits-all, … and the fashion cycles are longer in furniture. The one we’re in now has lasted about 15 years.
“And there’s no shoplifting. You can run a store this size with two or three people. Back in the day, we had a store smaller than this, and it took 16 to 18 employees to run it because there were so many departments.”
A lot of people have asked about the signs outside his business and around town that assert “Store Closing,” and the answer is yes — Batesville Furniture is closing.
“I don’t know yet exactly what I’m going to do, but we have this building, and I may put something else in here with a different business model,” Covington said. “This is a good location with a 26,000-car count daily.”
The final day for the store has yet to be decided, however.
“We’ve got a lot of inventory to move — we’ve got warehouses full of inventory, so it’s going to be several weeks, I’m sure,” he said.
“My father passed away Sept. 11 of this year; he was 82. My mother just turned 80; she still works here at the store,” Covington said.
Covington actually runs four businesses out of the same office. Batesville Furniture sells residential furniture, but for the past 15 years, his business Covington Commercial has supplied other companies and industries with furniture, including the city’s community center and aquatics park, the new county library, Intimidator Group and Ozark Mountain Poultry’s new hiring facility, next to Batesville Furniture.
Covington also supplies goods to the federal government — not just furniture. He’s a vendor for everything from shoes and clothing to heavy equipment, golf carts, door mats and internet service. By law, he said, 23 percent of government discretionary spending must go to small businesses — those with 500 employees or less.
“I just won a bid to provide internet service for five years for the North Little Rock and Little Rock VA medical centers. We just got through with a big furniture install in Pennsylvania; then the government bought a trailer for the Miami VA Medical Center, and we just got it delivered yesterday,” Covington said. “So I’m juggling all these businesses; then when there’s a problem, I have to be involved with it.”
The fourth business is a real estate/rental-house business.
“That keeps us all pretty busy,” he said.
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Covington said that as a previous Baptist deacon, music minister and Sunday School teacher, his faith is his most important goal in life. He and his family are members of Maple Springs Baptist Church in Rosie.
He also completed the Faith Bible Institute’s three-year course on the Bible in 2015.
The son of a Baptist preacher, “My whole life revolved around going from one revival to the next,” he said. “We lived next door to the church. I would invite my friends from school, and we’d go over and sleep in the church. We thought that was cool.”
That was in Michigan, and when the family moved back to Arkansas, Travis Covington pastored First Landmark (now White Drive Baptist) when it was on Davis Lane in Westside.
Once a month, Charles Covington also goes with a group from church to Grimes prison in Newport.
“Of the 1,200 inmates, there are probably 75 to 80 of them who are genuine Christian people, so we go and have church,” Covington said. “They’ve got their own band, their own choir, and it is just awesome.”
He said the first time he went to the prison and had to go through six locked doors to get to the “belly of the beast” to have church — he was a little apprehensive. It ran through his mind that “if something were to happen, we ain’t getting out of there, and there’s a lot of bad people in that prison,” he said.
But now he sees the men who attend and get so much out of the service — some are crying — that he feels blessed to be a part of the ministry.
“We live in the greatest time ever, as far as how far we’ve come with technology, he said. I can remember buying my first pocket calculator that I paid $400 for, and it would barely fit in your shirt pocket, and all it would do is add, multiply and divide. Everything has changed so much.”
It wasn’t that long ago, he said, that people were just concentrating on keeping their families alive.
“They weren’t thinking about where are we going to go on vacation,” he said. “Now we’ve got so many other things to think about.” Covington said he has been on several mission trips to Mexico and Peru, and he believes every teenager in America should go to a Third World country and see how things are outside the United States.
“They’re living like we did a hundred years ago — they’re trying to survive,” Covington said.
He said he has a friend who has a shoe store, and he’d been on a mission trip. Five boys from the village came to America to visit him, and they asked why he had so many things hanging on the wall that were not useful.
Covington’s friend also gave each boy two pair of shoes to take home. Their sponsor later told him the boys each gave the shoes away, or at least one pair, because no person there owned two pair of shoes; it was simply unheard of.
“We just don’t know how blessed we are,” Covington said.
He joked that he didn’t know if he would have survived living even a hundred years ago and that his idea of “roughing it” is staying in a camper using a generator to run the air conditioning.
“The last time we went camping, we were at Greers Ferry, and it was so stinking hot that we packed up our gear and went to a hotel and checked in,” he said, laughing.
But he said he knows how blessed he is to have his family nearby and all living in comfortable homes with plenty of food, clothing and so on.
He said he still has pressures and worries — the public perception may be that he’s got it all, but he also has a lot of debts, a lot of stress, and people don’t realize that. But he’s thankful for all the opportunities he’s had and the fact that he’s been able to put in the hard work.
“All good gifts are from above, and I am so blessed,” he said.