Strength in the Midsection

By Marshall Loeb

Strength right down the middle is the key to a strong baseball team or military force or national economy. So it might be worthwhile to look at the state of business in the city that by many measures is closest, geographically and spiritually, to the middle of America: Wichita. Rising from the pool-table Kansas wheat fields, surrounded by aerospace plants and enormous grain elevators that ride the prairies like battleships, this community of 262,000 has a problem. There are not enough workers to meet its surging demand.

The number of jobs has risen by more than a third during the 1970s, and unemployment in the past year is down from 4.1% to 2.9%, which is about as low as it can go in America's highly mobile society. (The national average is 5.8%.) Business leaders are eagerly advertising around the country for more skilled workers. If any butcher, baker or engineer wants a job, he or she will have no trouble finding it in this bustling producer of meat, wheat, planes, oil and gas.

Wichita is fortunate because all those businesses are buoyant now. But the community is also typical of many middle-size cities in the rich band between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, Austin, Omaha and others are quietly booming, with their unemployment down to the 2 1/2%-3 1/2 range. They are the beneficiaries of economic diversification and the increasing desire of Americans to settle in cities that, as Beech Aircraft President Frank Hedrick puts it, "are small enough to allow individuals to excel and big enough to give them plenty of room to excel."

Hedrick, 68, whose florid face testifies to years spent in the summer sun and winter winds of Wichita, points out that "this certainly isn't the world's fanciest climate, so we must have other advantages." In his view, one echoed by various local business and labor chiefs: "A work ethic still exists in this part of the world. People feel they have to give a day's work for a day's pay." Local people commonly speak of the city's Midwestern "openness." Says Hedrick: "I was in North Palm Beach the other day, and, hell, you have to be a second cousin to Jesus Christ if you want to play at the Seminole Golf Club. But the social as well as the economic strata are open to anybody who wants to work in Wichita."

More than 160 Vietnamese refugees are doing well working in a local meat packing plant (where employment has doubled in the past four years), and some of them are beginning to start their own small enterprises on the side. Wichita's unemployment rate for blacks, 7.7%, is much lower than the nation's average. Women are also getting ahead. Olive Beech, who with her late husband founded Beech Aircraft, is now its chairman (not chairperson), and thus ranks as one of the nation's highest female executives. Wichita's Nancy Kassebaum is the U.S. Senate's only woman member; the city's mayor is Connie Peters.

An admirable boosterism pervades the city. A. Dwight Button, chairman of the Fourth National Bank, boasts that he has hired two senior officers away from Houston banks. Iowa-born Richard Upton, who runs the hyperactive Chamber of Commerce, points to Metropolitan Life, NCR and many other big companies that have opened branches in the area. Tom Pierce, Wichita's AFL-CIO chief, notes that despite its right-to-work law, Kansas' average hourly wage is fairly high ($6.11). Says Pierce: "If workers come here and stay for two or three months, you would have a tough time getting them to move out."

Sure there are shortcomings. Housing is scarce. Even the most vocal Wichita cheerleaders admit to a certain provincialism. Bible Belt conservatives have barred the public sale of liquor by the drink. But the city is on a culture kick. In the past decade, Wichita has opened a flying saucer-shaped civic center that dominates downtown, a 12,200-seat coliseum for conventions and cattle shows, one of the nation's better Indian museums, two art museums, a planetarium, a zoo and three new libraries. That hardly makes the community a rival to, say, Chicago. Yet almost everything is up to date in this Kansas city, and that is a good sign for the nation that surrounds it.

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