Jack E. Skaggs

Jack Skaggs, a lifelong Plainview resident, quietly served his home town for many decades, contributing to its growth and prosperity as a businessman, landowner, and civic leader and playing an important role in a wide range of local causes.

John Edward Skaggs was born in 1910 in Gainesville, home of the family doctor, though his parents had moved to Plainview ten years earlier. He grew up in Plainview and graduated from high school here in 1928 and from Wayland College, then a two-year school, in 1929.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in Austin in 1931 and returned to Plainview to manage the family farms and other property, including the well-known Skaggs Building at the corner of Broadway and Seventh. In that same year he married Maxine Caddel, whom he had known when she was Queen of Plainview High in 1928. The couple eventually had two children and six grandchildren.

In World War II, Jack volunteered for the armed services the day after Pearl Harbor and spent the years 1943–1945 in the China-Burma-India Theater as a finance officer in the Army Air Corps. He came home at the end of 1945 but continued to serve in the Army Reserve until 1954, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He was a life member of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Jack was a director of the City National Bank for 25 years. He was on the Plainview School Board in the early 1950s when the new high school was built. He was a board member and president of The Plainview Chamber of Commerce and Board of City Development, and a board member of the Plainview–Hale County Industrial Foundation, Central Plains Hospital (later Methodist Hospital), Heart Association, the United Way, and Salvation Army. He was a longtime and honored member of Kiwanis International and served as president of the Plainview club.

Jack was an active member of the First Baptist Church from 1924 on. He was on the board of Wayland Baptist College (now University) for nine years, endowed a scholarship in his wife’s name, and made a major donation to the building of the school’s Resources Learning Center.

He was a director of the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, which furnishes most of the water for Plainview and other Panhandle cities, for nearly two decades and served as its president from 1982 to 1992. The water treatment plant in west Plainview is named for him.

In 1993 the Chamber of Commerce presented Jack Skaggs the Citizens Service Award for his longtime work on behalf of the community. He died in 1997.