"If you had to summarize Jack Pickens, I guess you'd call him 'a prominent Little Rock businessman and civic leader.' That's okay... but it's like saying the Pope is involved in church work, or that Babe Ruth used to play baseball." --George Kell, quoted in the Arkansas Gazette, June 9, 1983
According to his World War II draft card, Paul Jackson Pickens was born in Cooper, Texas, on June 21, 1904. He married Eudora Rose Shipton in 1928, and by the early 1940s their young family lived on South Broadway in Little Rock.
Jack Pickens was working as a vice president for the Acme Brick Company branch at 208 Louisiana St., across from the old Gazette building.
Though he had grown up in Cooper and Fort Worth, Pickens always said that he was raised in the Acme brickyard at Malvern, according to an interview that Gus Vratsinas gave Susan Wiles of the Gazette after Pickens' death.
Pickens joined the Army on March 13, 1942, was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1943, and was honorably discharged July 30, 1945.
The Ditmars-Dickmann Construction Company was founded in Muskogee, Okla., in 1943. Early that year it received contracts from the U.S. Corps of Engineers to build the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) facilities at the Blytheville air port (less than $100,000) and the WAAC facilities at the Stuttgart air field (less than $50,000).
Ditmars-Dickmann was also hired to take apart Civilian Conservation Corps buildings from various camps and reconstruct them for WAAC facilities at Camp Robinson. (According to a Gazette article, the WAACs at Camp Robinson called their rows of barracks a "bivou-WAAC." "Ptomaine domain" was their name for the mess hall.)
Returning from his service in the Army, Jack Pickens joined S.F. Ditmars, John Dickmann, and John W. Bond to open the Little Rock office of Ditmars-Dickmann-Pickens in the Gazette building.
In July 1945, the firm got a $110,000 contract from the War Department to build a warehouse and two mess halls at Fort Chaffee. The next month, they got a $44,000 contract to build a facility at Fort Chaffee for processing returning veterans before discharge.
Ditmars-Dickmann-Pickens had a major hand in the construction of the Alcoa plant at Bauxite in the early 1950s. Construction of that plant was delayed in February 1952, when the Roofers and Waterproofers Union Local 308 struck against Ditmars-Dickmann-Pickens subcontractor Ketcher Roofing Company over Ketcher's use of non-union workers.
In 1954, Ditmars-Dickmann-Pickens became Dickmann-Pickens-Bond. In 1961 it became Pickens-Bond. The Little Rock office grew much faster than the Muskogee office because of Jack Pickens, according to Vratsinas' 1983 Gazette interview.
"He was instrumental in landing a lot of contracts," Vratsinas said. "He was an aggressive salesman. One of his fortes was that he was able to charm people."
In the late 1960s, Pickens-Bond got a $25 million contract to build the Remington Arms plant at Lonoke.
Here is a short list of buildings that Pickens-Bond built and projects it worked on in downtown Little Rock alone, compiled from Susan Wiles' 1983 Gazette story on Jack Pickens, Jess Ardrey's 2019 Wittenberg, Deloney, Davidson retrospective in Soiree, and Evin Demirel's 2009 featured obituary from this newspaper for Pickens-Bond executive Larry Kelley:
Excelsior Hotel (now the Marriott), Statehouse Convention Center, Doyle Rogers Parking Plaza, First South Building/Rogers Building (now the Stephens Building).
Atkins Insurance Corporation Building (Pickens-Bond moved into that building on Capitol just west of Main that comes to a painful-looking angle; Henry Moore's "Standing Knife Edge" stood in its plaza for years), Savers Federal Savings and Loan Association (now BCBS). The Southwestern Bell (now AT&T) buildings on Capitol and Eighth Street.
First National Bank (later First Commercial Bank and now Regions Center); Union National Bank; Capitol Tower Building/TCBY Tower.
TCBY is now Simmons, and at 40 stories it's the tallest building in Arkansas. Even before it went up, Pickens-Bond advertised, correctly, that Little Rock's was "a Pickens-Bond skyline."
West of the state Capitol, Pickens-Bond built the Multi-Agency Complex (the Big MAC building). Pickens-Bond projects elsewhere in Little Rock and in North Little Rock include McCain Mall, University Mall, and Park Plaza Shopping Center; Doctors Hospital, Baptist Medical Center, the Medical Tower building, Plaza West building, the Little Rock airport terminal, the Teletype manufacturing plant, the North Little Rock Community Center on Pershing Avenue, and the Arkansas Gazette printing plant, now the printing plant for this newspaper.
Pickens-Bond also, according to Wiles' 1983 story, "built most of the Dillard department stores in Arkansas and other states," as well as numerous buildings at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Arkansas Tech University, and Ouachita Baptist University.
Pickens-Bond's construction business remained strong long after Pickens' retirement, but the company suffered after it entered partnerships with construction clients based out of state, according to a 1988 story by Leroy Donald in the Gazette. Most of the troubled properties were condominiums and apartments in Texas and along the Florida coast.
At its peak in 1985, Pickens-Bond employed over 500 people in seven states and had over $300 million in construction contracts. But in 1987, it filed for Chapter 11 reorganization and was acquired by Colorado-based Hensel-Phelps Construction Company.