Frank John Wikoff (Stillwater, OK)
Frank John Wikoff (March 27, 1867 – August 4, 1950)
Biography
- Name: Frank John Wikoff
- Birth: March 27, 1867 Metamora, Illinois
- Death: August 4, 1950 Arcadia, California
In addition to his banking career in Stillwater and Oklahoma City, Frank J. Wikoff participated in the founding of the city of Stillwater and was an important force in the establishment and early financing of Oklahoma Agricultural & Mechanical College, also located in Stillwater and which is now Oklahoma State University.
Early Life and Move to Oklahoma
Frank J. Wikoff was born on March 27, 1867, in Metamora, Illinois, the oldest son of Isaac and Harriet Wikoff. Isaac Wikoff had been in business as a druggist and banker in Metamora before moving his family to Winfield, Kansas in 1886. As a young man, Frank attended the University of Illinois, where he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1885, followed by a bachelor’s degree from the Cincinnati College of Law in 1889. Frank Wikoff returned to Winfield briefly before taking part in the land run of 1889 into Oklahoma Territory. One of Frank’s younger brothers, Charles, who had trained as a dentist, joined him in Oklahoma sometime in the early 1890s, setting up his practice and later serving as a director of, and investor in, his brother’s banks.
The Founding of Stillwater and the Oklahoma A&M College
Arriving in Oklahoma at the age of 22, Frank Wikoff immediately became one of the founders and civic leaders of the new city of Stillwater (Robert Lowry, a fellow lawyer only slightly older than Wikoff at the time, is conventionally regarded as the “father” of Stillwater). In addition to participating with the land survey team in the physical platting of Stillwater, Wikoff wrote the city’s charter and forthwith became the first city attorney, followed the first county attorney and first county judge of Payne County. Wikoff was also notable for his work in securing the location of Oklahoma’s land-grant institution, Oklahoma Agricultural & Mechanical College (now Oklahoma State University) in Stillwater. After Oklahoma Territory was organized through passage of the Organic Act of 1890, Stillwater entered into spirited competition with other communities to be the sites of a variety of public institutions that needed to be established, such as the territorial capital and the territorial penitentiary. Both Lowry and Wikoff had acquired their educations at land-grant institutions in Iowa and Illinois and considered the hosting of a similar college to be a great prize for Stillwater, not to mention a steady source of federal money. Together, the two men were instrumental in locating suitable tracts of land and arranging the necessary $10,000 bond financing for the prospective college’s first permanent building, later named Old Central; these steps enabled Stillwater to win the competition to be the site of the new A & M college by the end of 1890.
The general political context of the 1890s assured that Oklahoma A & M’s early years would be bumpy. Like other early Stillwater boosters, Lowry and Wikoff were Republicans. Given their party’s lock on national politics, Oklahoma’s appointed territorial governors were, almost without exception, also Republican. In contrast, Oklahoma’s territorial legislature was dominated by Populists and Democrats, which complicated attempts to secure additional funding for the new college. Lowry and Wikoff continued to nurture Oklahoma A & M during its early years through their service on the college’s Board of Regents. In particular, between 1895 and 1898 Wikoff worked closely with the college’s fourth President, George E. Morrow, to secure funding from the territorial legislature sufficient to finance additional building construction. Thereafter Wikoff replaced Lowry as President of the Board of Regents in 1898 and continued serving as board member until 1908.
A lifelong Republican, Wikoff did serve as the first chairman of the Payne County Republican Central Committee. Other than that early post, Wikoff otherwise eschewed active, public involvement in Oklahoma state politics, never running for office or serving in appointive positions, apart from a very brief stint as territorial bank commissioner (see below) and service in the early 1910s on the state board of education, which was preoccupied at the time with controversies over textbook purchases.
In December 1891 Wikoff married Jennie Munhall, daughter of Stillwater’s postmaster; together they had two daughters.
Banking in Stillwater (1891-1908)
Wikoff’s banking career began at a state institution, the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Stillwater, where he served as Cashier from 1891 to 1897, with Alexander Campbell as President (in 1899 this bank would reorganize as the First National Bank of Stillwater, Charter 5206). In 1897 Frank Wikoff, his brother Charles, and Henry E. Hand incorporated under a state charter the Citizens Bank of Stillwater at $5,000 capital, with Hand as President and Frank Wikoff as Cashier. In addition to their bank, the latter two men operated the Wikoff & Hand agency from the same premises to peddle what they advertised as “cheap” tornado insurance policies to local residents.
In 1900 the Citizens Bank expanded its capital and took a national charter as the National Bank of Commerce of Stillwater (Charter 5436). At about this point Charles Wikoff, Frank’s dentist brother, severed his relationship with the bank and moved away from Stillwater, eventually establishing a practice in Chicago. Jennie Wikoff’s brother, J. E. “Eddie” Munhall, also became connected with this bank as Assistant Cashier and Vice President in the early 1900s.
Wikoff continued as Cashier at that bank until March 1901, when he accepted an offer from Oklahoma Governor Cassius Barnes to be the Territorial Bank Commissioner. This appointment lasted all of six months, with Wikoff soon resigning reportedly due to his inability to get his traveling expenses, occasioned by frequent bank examinations, reimbursed by the government. Meanwhile Chauncey A. Houston had replaced Wikoff as Cashier. In August 1901 Wikoff bought out Hand’s shares to acquire controlling interest in the National Bank of Commerce and became its President, a position he held until 1908. Wikoff also served as President of the Oklahoma Territorial Bankers Association from 1903 to 1904.
Relocation to Oklahoma City (1909-1926)
After twenty years in Stillwater, Frank Wikoff’s ambitions outgrew the confines of that smaller setting and in 1909 he made the decision to relocate to Oklahoma City. There he organized the Tradesmen’s State Bank that same year, with himself as President and his brother-in-law “Eddie” Munhall as Cashier. Wikoff’s move occurred at a particularly troubled time for banking in Oklahoma City. After the heady growth in deposits and institutions fueled by the state’s new deposit guaranty law, the shortcomings of the insurance scheme became dramatically apparent with the collapse of Columbia Bank & Trust Company in late 1909. This failure and others soon to follow put the state’s guaranty fund, and the state’s banking industry itself, into disarray. In this setting, Frank Wikoff quickly developed a reputation for sensible and conservative leadership. Although a trenchant critic of Oklahoma’s deposit guaranty law himself, Wikoff nonetheless refrained during these difficult years from converting his bank to a national charter, in contrast to other opponents of the law.
As a thought leader in Oklahoma banking, Wikoff proved to be a consistent skeptic of government intervention and regulation. His views on deposit insurance paralleled his attitude towards the broader currency question of the time. Rather than support the creation of a government-run central bank, Wikoff preferred the simpler reform of formalizing the currency-issuing powers of reserve city clearing house associations, which had resorted to circulating clearinghouse certificates of doubtful legality during financial panics. In this way, he contended, the country could acquire an elastic currency that was attuned to the liquidity needs as best understood by local bankers. Despite having taken this rather minimalist position, after the Federal Reserve System was established Wikoff fought for Oklahoma City to be the site of a branch office within the Tenth Federal Reserve District.
In 1912 Wikoff, described by The Oklahoma Banker magazine as “perhaps most versatile man in the banking business in Oklahoma,” was elected President of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce at a particularly troubled time in the city’s economic situation and thereafter served on its board of directors. Although barely forty-five years old at the time, by then Wikoff was lauded as the most experienced banker in the state, in terms of his continuous years of service. In August the following year the Tradesmen’s State Bank absorbed the Oklahoma State Bank of Oklahoma City. Rumors that this was a rescue of the latter bank were denied, but the move was applauded by the city’s financial community as a welcome consolidation of the city’s overbanked situation. In February of 1918 Wikoff was elected President of the Oklahoma City Clearing House. Thanks to its merger and judicious growth, by 1920 the Tradesmen’s State Bank had quadrupled its capital and grown its resources over tenfold. At this point, with another crisis looming in Oklahoma’s deposit guaranty fund, Wikoff finally converted his bank to a national institution (Charter 11628).
Retirement to California and Later Years
In January of 1926, after nearly forty years in banking and at the peak of his career, Wikoff sold his interest in the Tradesmen’s National Bank to E. A. Walker and simply walked away from active business and public life. In a newspaper questionnaire that he had responded to back in 1920, Wikoff listed his hobby as “making things grow.” What that actually meant became clear later with his surprise announcement. Not even sixty years old at retirement, making things grow was precisely what Wikoff undertook to do in the last decades of his life. After returning in August 1926 from an extended trip through Europe, Frank and Jennie Wikoff decamped to southern California, where they lived near their two married daughters for the next twenty-five years. There, in a comfortable retirement that extended throughout both the Great Depression and World War II, Frank Wikoff spent his years engaging in horticulture, gardening and landscaping a succession of residences.
In periodic reports to his Oklahoma friends, Wikoff alluded to the spiritual transformation that this change of life had brought about. “You see I have become a philosopher,” he averred in 1935. Repudiating the “haste, waste, and noise” of modern America, over the years Wikoff developed a taste for deliberate and purposive work in the service of natural beauty and good taste. Bankrolled as he was by his prior, lucrative financial career, Wikoff could afford to treat his manual labor not as drudgery but as an ennobling and purifying experience. As he wrote to his friends, “the hands that did it are calloused and their owner’s face is tanned and ruddy … as my hoe clicks against the pebbles a mockingbird sings to me from the tip of a nearby Eucalyptus.”
Frank Wikoff passed away on August 4, 1950, at the residence of one of his daughters in Arcadia, California.
Bank Officer Summary
During his banking career, Frank J. Wikoff was involved with the following bank(s):
- National Bank of Commerce, Stillwater, OK (Charter 5436): President 1901-1908; Cashier 1900
- Tradesmens NB, Oklahoma City, OK (Charter 11628): President 1920-1925
Sources
- Bankers Magazine, August 1901, p. 264.
- Fisher, Leroy H. Oklahoma State University: Historic Old Central (Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University 1988), pp. 74-78.
- The Investor (Oklahoma City, OK), September 1913, pp, 8-9; February 1918; May 1918; December 1918.
- Leonard, John William, ed. Who’s Who in Finance and Banking 1920-1922 (Brooklyn, NY: Who’s Who in Finance, Inc. 1922), p. 738.
- The Oklahoma Banker (Oklahoma City, OK), January 1912, p. 13 (quote); August 1916, pp. 56-57; November 1928, pp. 32-33; May 1935, pp. 24-25 (quote); November 1949, p. 35; August 1950, pp. 37-39 (extensive obituary).
- The Oklahoma News (Oklahoma City, OK), May 22, 1920.
- Oklahoma State Capitol, February 22, 1890; July 8, 1895; November 10, 1897.
- The Stillwater Gazette, February 24, 1898; June 21, 1900; March 9, 1901; June 18, 1909; April 4, 1913; February 1, 1924; August 11, 1950.
- Wikoff, Frank J. “What Is the Matter” Southwestern Commercial News, September 15, 1910, p. 5.
- Wikoff, Frank J. “The Guaranty of Bank Deposits” Journal of the American Bankers Association, July 1922, pp. 1-4.
- Wikoff, Frank J. “Guaranty Law Caused Loss of $15,000,000” Journal of the American Bankers Association, July 1923, p. 44.
- Findagrave.com: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/53705305/frank-john-wikoff/photo
- Banks & Bankers Historical Database (1782-1935), https://spmc.org/bank-note-history-project