Wichita Falls Flim Flam Man and His Monument. (original) (raw)

Before wildcatters found oil north of town in 1912, Wichita Falls was just a small county seat cow town.

Within five years, however, Wichita Falls had become the major commercial and retail center of the North Texas oil patch. Money flowed as freely as black crude.

Most honest men and women worked hard to earn some of that money. But Wichita Falls also had characters like J.D. McMahon, a landman and structural engineer by training, a con man by inclination. No dummy, McMahon came up with a clever way to steal � architecture.

McMahon is long gone, but the Newby-McMahon Building still stands, a monument to gullibility and its enabler, greed.

In 1906, well before the boom, Oklahoma businessman Augustus Newby built a one-story brick building near the railroad tracks on the east side of downtown. Keeping the building leased was no sure deal until the boom, when renters came easily. Newby had died in 1909, but by 1919, the modest structure bulged with seven tenants, including McMahon.

Originally from Philadelphia, McMahon ran a drilling rig construction company. With office space in great demand, McMahon made it known that he intended to build a handsome highrise adjacent to the Newby Building.

Circulating a set of blueprints depicting a skyscrapper that would tower over the plains, McMahon collected some 200,000frominvestors.(Thatmuchmoneyisequivalentto200,000 from investors. (That much money is equivalent to 200,000frominvestors.(Thatmuchmoneyisequivalentto2.8 million today.)

In a classic case of failing to read the fine print, ingenuous investors did not notice something unusual about the blueprints for the proposed skyscrapper: The scale had been calculated in inches, not feet. What investors took as plans for a 480-foot structure rising roughly 48 stories, actually called for 480 inches in height.

Having raised ample capital, McMahon began construction. No one knew the new building would sit on land McMahon didn�t even own, but investors did notice that for some reason the red brick building stopped at four floors with only enough square footage for one small office per floor.