Part V, Oklahoma City during the 1940s: Oh! What a Beautiful Morning

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Sep 2, 2003 by Journal Record staff

World War II dominated the '40s, and perhaps the century, with unparalleled devastation and innovation. As with the Civil War in the North, the mobilization effort taught the United States just how powerful it could be. From radar to rockets to the jet engine to the atom bomb, there seemed no end to the limits of science. Americans thrilled at the heroism of D-Day and Bastogne, and they choked over the horror of Iwo Jima and the Holocaust. The triumphant war effort transformed the nation, and led us into the Cold War, yet life went on.

Harry James left Benny Goodman's Orchestra to form his own band and hired then-unknown Frank Sinatra as his lead singer. Even with Depression hardships, the average life expectancy of an American grew to 64 years. DiMaggio hit safely in 56th consecutive games. Glenn Miller became a sensation and a legend after disappearing while entertaining the troops. Orson Wells startled the film world with Citizen Kane, while Humphrey Bogart made his name with Casablanca. The federal minimum wage was raised to 40 cents per hour. Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle started television shows destined to for greatness. The Justice Department filed a suit in an attempt to break up AT&T and its manufacturing arm, Western Electric.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, one of many hits for the musical duo. Gable & Gotwals entered the Tulsa marketplace. Behind dominating 7-foot center Bob Kurland, Oklahoma A&M's Henry "Hank" Iba became the first coach to win consecutive NCAA titles in 1945 and 1946. More than 1,500 were injured, 170 perished and over 10,000 homes were destroyed when a series of tornadoes swept through Oklahoma and Texas.

Closer to home, Edmond celebrated its own oil wells. The OU law school struggled over integration. Ima and Homer Mathis got their boys engaged in the used furniture business. And Charles "Bud" Wilkinson rocked Oklahoma City as the head football coach of the Oklahoma Sooners, ending the decade with a 21-game winning streak on the way to the team's first national championship.

1940

The newly incorporated Group Hospital Service of Oklahoma opened an office in the First National Bank Building, offering prepaid hospital insurance. The nonprofit organization, formed that year in Tulsa, has since expanded into other areas of insurance as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma.

On April 8, the War Department issued an order awarding a 900- acre Army air depot to Oklahoma City. It was named for Maj. Gen. Clarence L. Tinker of Pawhuska, Okla., who lost his life while leading a flight of LB-30 "Liberators" on a long-range strike against Japanese forces on Wake Island during the early months of World War II. For the remainder of that conflict, Tinker's industrial plant repaired B-24 and B-17 bombers and fitted B-29s for combat. Today, Tinker Air Force Base at Midwest City is made up of 5,020 acres with 732 buildings containing 15.5 million square feet of floor space, including 136 acres of indoor maintenance area and 254 acres of ramp space all supported by the Wing. With nearly 24,000 civilian and military assigned to the base, including Air Force and Navy active duty personnel, the base is comparable to a city with a population of 30,000. The Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center at the base manages an inventory of 2,261 aircraft, nearly 23,000 jet engines and airborne accessories management includes responsibility for some 24,000 different avionics and accessories components, plus missile systems. And that's not to mention Oklahoma's largest credit union.

To accommodate and feed off Tinker, Midwest City was founded by W. P. "Bill" Atkinson. He had learned an Army air depot would be built in an area of land that he had acquired east of Oklahoma City. After meeting with Air Corps officials, he found that they desired a community complete with shopping centers, schools and churches, rather than just temporary housing. Atkinson hired Steward Mot, a master land planner, to design that community. Ten years later Midwest City was chosen "America's Model City."

In 1941, the Fleming-Wilson food distributor of Topeka changed its name to the Fleming Co. and branched out of Kansas for the first time, buying the Carroll, Brough & Robinson Co. of Oklahoma City. The company would later move its headquarters to Oklahoma City, becoming for a time the nation's largest food distributor.

L.D. Lacy opened Central Bank in 1941. It would become the city's fifth-largest bank before merging into Bank One in 1994.

In 1941, inventor Harry Goodman launched Little Giant Pump Co. His pumps were used in evaporative cooling systems that predated modern air conditioning systems. The firm became the world's largest manufacturer of small submersible pumps.

Carpenter Paper of Omaha, Neb., opened a 70,000-square-foot warehouse in Oklahoma City at Classen and Robert S. Kerr Avenue. Many analysts considered the 1941 structure the most advanced warehouse in the nation. They put the site up for sale in 1983.

1942

In January, the Army Corps of Engineers asked contractor Erick Lippert of Boone, Iowa, to complete several water treatment plants in Oklahoma and north Texas. That summer Lippert gathered his portion of the family construction firm, along with brothers Reuben and Lee, and established Lippert Brothers Construction of Oklahoma City. In addition to water treatment plants, the firm also built "scores of Army barracks" in the Southwest. The firm converted these into college buildings after the war.