James Henry Quillen (January 11, 1916 – November 2, 2003) was an American politician who served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Tennessee from 1963 to 1997. Quillen represented the 1st congressional district, which covers the northeast corner of the state, including the Tri-Cities region. Early life Quillen was born in Scott County, Virginia, the fifth of ten children, son of John A. and Hannah Quillen, near the Tennessee line and was later a 1934 graduate of Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee. Quillen worked as a restaurant kitchen prep worker, a grocery store clerk, a copy boy, and later as a young adult, an advertising salesman for a Kingsport newspaper. During 1936, Quillen invested his own personal savings of $42 to become the publisher and owner of The Kingsport Mirror, a weekly newspaper that he started in Kingsport, Tennessee. Quillen sold The Kingsport Mirror during 1939 and moved to Johnson City, Tennessee (where he resided at the Montrose Court Apartments) to start up another weekly newspaper, The Johnson City Times. Draft exemption and military service Prior to the U.S. entry into World War II, Quillen received a two-year Selective Service System Class 3-A draft deferment beginning in December 1940 through late November 1942. Quillen later served in the United States Navy as a public information officer from late 1942 to 1946. Quillen received his overseas orders in late 1944, with his assignment aboard the Ticonderoga class aircraft carrier USS Antietam (CV-36). The USS Antietam entered the Pacific theater of operations too late in the war to participate in combat, as the carrier arrived in Hawaii from the Panama Canal just as the first atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on Japan. Entry into state and party politics Eventually becoming a Kingsport and Johnson City based real estate development and insurance company owner (starting Kingsport Development Company, Inc.), and bank executive following World War II, Quillen also was elected as a Republican member of the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1954, serving four terms from a district in Sullivan County. Quillen was later selected as a Tennessee delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1956, 1964, and 1968. Elected into the U.S. Congress During 1961, B. Carroll Reece, who had represented Tennessee's 1st congressional district for all but six of the last 40 years, died in office. His wife, Louise, took over