Wichita Kansas in Profile
For centuries, the future site of Wichita Kansas – famous in song and story, as the Glenn Campbell/Jimmy Webb song “Wichita Lineman” illustrates – was inhabited by the peaceful and commerce-minded Indians whose name is now attached to the community. Then in the late 1500s Coronado showed up looking for the non-existent El Dorado, and Wichita hasn’t been the same since.
In 1914, while Europe dissolved into the self-destructive lunacy of World War I, oil was discovered near Wichita, giving rise to the city’s petroleum industry. The profits from that discovery were plowed by local entrepreneurs into the embryonic airline industry. In 1917, the year Bolsheviks seized Russia and Wilson’s Progressives manipulated the U.S. into the war, the first plane – the Cessna Comet – was manufactured in Wichita. Between 1920 and 1923, twenty-three Swallows – apparently the name “spits” wasn’t suitable – were manufactured in Witchita, which was also establishing a national reputation as a test center for new aviation.
Lloyd Stearman and Walter Beech, employees of the Wichita-based Swallow company, left that company in January 1925 and joined with Clyde Cessna to form Travel Air. Lloyd Stearman left the company in 1926 to start Stearman Aircraft in Venice, California. Cessna quit in January 1927 to start Cessna. Stearman would only be gone from Wichita for a year before returning.
Walter Beech’s Travel Air expanded so dramatically -- employing over 600 workers and working in a huge factory complex constructed from 1927 to 1929 – that Wichita was tagged as "Travel Air City" by residents. The company merged with the huge Curtis Wright Corporation in the Roaring Twenties' heyday of company buyouts and takeovers just two months before the Stock Market crash in 1929. Workers were laid off by the hundreds during 1930 and more so in 1931. By the fall of 1932 all workers were let go in Wichita, equipment was sold and the entire Travel Air plant sat empty.
In March 1932 Walter quit Curtis Wright to form Beech Aircraft with his wife Olive Ann and hired Ted Wells as his chief engineer. The first four or five "Beechcraft" were built in the vacant Cessna Aircraft plant which was also closed during the depression. Beech later leased and then bought the Travel Air plant from Curtis Wright and men, machinery, and an airplane or two were moved from the Cessna plant.
The city experienced a population explosion during World War II when it became a major manufacturing center for airplanes needed in the war effort. At this point Rosie the Riveter would have been an appropriate civic icon. By 1945, 4.2 bombers were being produced daily in Wichita. Stearman Aircraft, later purchased by the Boeing Company, was founded in Wichita, as were Beech Aircraft, Cessna Aircraft, and LearJet. The city remains a major manufacturing center for the aircraft industry today, with all of these and Airbus still having major centers there, hence its nickname: "The Air Capital."
Wichita was also a significant entrepreneurial business center during the pre and post-war period, with Coleman, Mentholatum, Pizza Hut, White Castle, Taco Tico and Koch Industries having all been founded in Wichita. Ironically, White Castle closed all of their restaurants in Wichita in 1938 and has not operated in the state of Kansas after a failed revival attempt in the Kansas City area in the early 1990s.