From Cowtown to Air Capital

Some say it is the land and the weather. Wichita lies in a flat river valley amid rolling prairie at the heart of the United States. Here, Arctic highs clash with Gulf lows to produce drama in the skies. Prairie folk live with the unexpected. Wichita has possessed a strong ability to adapt to change, to extract lessons from adversity and to transform itself to meet the future.

The city was never short of ideas. James Mead thought in 1870 that Wichita could attract the cattle trade and went about getting the railroad that was required. Real estate promoters in the 1880s made Wichita the fastest growing city in the United States. When the town lost a third of its population and half its valuation in the crash of the 1890s, new strategies emerged. William Coleman decided in 1900 to build a gasoline lantern here and made a global business of it. Shortly after that, J.J. Jones built a car, and in the same plant Clyde Cessna constructed airplanes. 

Wichita was one of the first cities in the U.S. to adopt the city commission and city manager form of government. Fairmount College became the Municipal University of Wichita in 1926, thanks to the willingness of townspeople to attempt great things. By 1928 Wichita was the Air Capital of the World - home to Laird, Travel Air (later Beechcraft), Cessna and Stearman (later Boeing-Wichita).

In the 1930s, Wichita dominated the neon sign business. Bernie Goodrum decided that he could start a zoo with animals injured on the highways and, in time, the Sedgwick County Zoo was nationally recognized. The city lobbied the federal government in World War II to build airplanes at the center of the country. As a result, more than $2 billion in federal defense spending came Wichita's way, and its population doubled in five years. Later, imagination and pragmatism turned a warehouse district into Old Town, where retail trade and downtown loft living took place in an atmosphere of historic buildings.

Wichita did not neglect its non-profit organizations. A woman's bequest resulted in an Art Museum. A collection of 1870s buildings saved from the wrecker's ball became a living history museum called Old Wichita Cowtown. Martin Palmer founded the internationally known Institute of Logopedics, pioneering in helping children with speech and motor defects. Urban Renewal in the 1960s resulted in the Century II and library civic complex and in a national award to Wichita for innovation. Later, a downtown church was converted to the Kansas African American Museum. The West Bank, which was created when an island was removed from the Arkansas River during the Great Depression, eventually became the site of Exploration Place, a science museum in a building with signature architecture.

There were, of course, the difficulties. The cattle drovers had to be wooed with money. The Wichita Eagle had to offer some of the best boom editorials ever to keep the real estate selling. Zoning and planning came to Wichita in the early 1920s - but not without considerable opposition. In the early 1930s almost every Wichita aircraft plant closed. Then Walter Beech and Dwane and Dwight Wallace proved that one could maintain a viable aircraft industry in hard times. Who but Fred Koch would have imagined it was possible to make money by exporting oil refining expertise to Russia? Who but R.H. Garvey could have built the largest group of grain elevators in the U.S.? Who but William Lear could build a business jet on the plains? When Frank and Dan Carney came to Willard Garvey in the 1950s to ask for a loan to start the first Pizza Hut, Garvey asked why people in Wichita would want to eat Italian food. The proper answer, of course, was "Why not?!"

Even those things that did not happen were interesting. Wichita did not get a coal gasification plant in the 1970s even though it had one of the most imaginative plans for dealing with the national energy crisis of those years. It did not build a downtown casino, upscale Blackbear Bosin's iconic sculpture "Keeper of the Plains" to the size of the Statue of Liberty, pass a Gay Rights Ordinance, or fluoridate the water. But there were serious local debates about all of these topics.

All the while, the city presented itself well. One speaker said the key was to "Find Good and Advertise It." Wichita threw off alliterative slogans, such as calling itself the "Athletic Ajax of the Aboundful Arkansas." In the 1880s, the city sent a train for relief of flood sufferers in Ohio, filled with Wichita people and decorated with murals showing Wichita's progress. The Chamber of Commerce sponsored an annual "Booster Train" early in the 20th century, and later converted it to a Kansas Air Tour, all promoting Wichita.

Wichita was indeed once a cattle town but, unlike many of its competitors in those days, it did not limit itself to that business, nor dry up when it lost it. "It is," a journalist wrote of Wichita in 1887, "a city built largely by the audacity, or if you please, the faith of its founders." Prairie Progressives constantly realized new dreams here, and the City of Wichita is in that business still.