WILLIAM F. O’BRIEN
EDMOND — In her recent memoir “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, My Family’s Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World,” Wall Street Journal Reporter Lucette Lagnado wrote of the fear that gripped the Jewish community of Cairo, Egypt, in 1942 when German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel made a radio broadcast to that city from the Egyptian desert town of El Alamein, where his army was situated. Rommel told his listeners that he would take their city and that he soon would be dining at Groppi’s, a famous restaurant on one of Cairo’s main thoroughfares.
Lagnado relates how during the second World War the Germans had made it a practice to patronize the renowned eateries in the cities that they had conquered, and how pictures of German officials dining at Maxim’s in Paris after that city had fallen to the German Army had been seen around the world. But Rommel was driven back from Cairo by the British forces led by General Montgomery, and the Jewish community of Cairo breathed a collective sigh of relief.
If a field marshal in command of an army were to have threatened Oklahoma City at that time with a similar message he probably would have said he soon would be dining at the Skirvin Hotel downtown. For as historian Bob Blackburn has detailed in his history of that hotel titled “A Tradition of Elegance,” throughout much of Oklahoma City’s history, the Skirvin Hotel was the city’s premier gathering place where politicians, power brokers and the affluent went to dine and socialize.
Built by oilman Bill Skirvin, it officially opened in 1911. Skirvin lived in the hotel with his wife and three children in a five-room suite on the ninth floor. His daughter Perl would in time be known as the famous Washington hostess Perl Mesta, and would serve as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. Her life was the inspiration for the Broadway play “Call Me Madam.”
As Blackburn documents, the hotel’s guests included blanketed Native Americans, ranchers and even on occasion outlaws such as bank robber Al Jennings. Skirvin, who described the establishment as his “225-room hobby,” often could be seen in the lobby greeting those guests. After a major expansion and renovation in 1930, the hotel opened the Venetian Room and Restaurant on the 14th floor. It featured live music and dancing.
After Skirvin’s death in 1944, the establishment was sold by his heirs to Dan James, who owned the Hotel Black that was several blocks from the Skirvin. James installed a pool on the north side of the hotel and also offered services for his guests that included a same-day laundry service, a full-time physician, a stenographer and notary. The Skirvin had a total of 250 employees to serve its guests during that time.
According to Blackburn, James pioneered employee benefits that included insurance coverage for longtime employees of the Skirvin and a Christmas dinner in the hotel for employees and their families. James sold the Skirvin to a group of out-of-state investors in 1963, and the hotel was to change hands several times until it closed in 1988.
But in 2007 it was renovated and reopened as the “Skirvin-Hilton Hotel,” and it is once again a symbol of elegance in the downtown Oklahoma City area. And the guests that fill its lobby today are just as diverse as the patrons who were greeted by Bill Skirvin there in the early decades of the last century.
WILLIAM F. O’BRIEN is an Oklahoma City attorney.
