A Trip: Wichita Falls, Texas

Burkburnett is just a few miles northwest of Wichita Falls so I spent a good deal of time there, moved there after getting out of the service, met my first wife there; bought my first home there. Like all things that become too familiar I did not see much of photographic value in or around this area. Actually I generally referred to it very degradingly as “Scenic Land, USA” and tried to get as far away as I could every weekend and vacation. Now I feel very differently about the town and the area. Every time I go back I want to spend a month or more just to photograph; feeling that even that is not adequate to exhaust all the photographic opportunities. Even though, on these infrequent trips I photograph in pretty much the same areas I always come away with different photographs. I seem to always end up somewhere around the old FW&DC RR Yard Office. I worked for the FW&D for awhile. Finally being an union employee got the best of me and I moved on. Just not cut out for the union made life.

I did accomplish something that I had wanted to do for fifty years and it really had nothing to do with photography. I got to go up to the fourth floor of the World’s Littlest Skyscraper. In 1919 a scam artist built a “skyscraper” in Wichita Falls. The dimensions of this skyscraper are ten feet wide, fourteen feet deep and forty feet high. This was during the Oil Boom in Burkburnett and the surrounding area so property in Wichita Falls was also booming. The builder of the skyscraper solicited investors and found them plentiful. He got each of them to sign off on the blueprint of the building. Unfortunately they did not notice that the dimensions shown on the blueprints were in inches, not feet. Needless to say, they eventually sued. A local judge ruled the contracts were valid because each of the investors had initialed the blueprints. The building is now included in the Historic District of Wichita Falls and in the National Register of Historic Places. In 1939 it was mentioned in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Originally it was the McMahon Building but Ripley called it the “World’s Littlest Skyscraper” and thus it remains.