If you look at all the twists of fate involved with Southwest’s beginnings, it’s amazing Southwest got off the ground, much less lasted 40 years. I’ve always been amazed that just the right person for just the right situation seems to come along with amazing prescience. Then just this morning, I was looking for references on something completely different, when a generally unknown nugget of information fell in my lap. At first, it didn’t register with me what I had just read, but then I slowed down and read it again, and I realized that I was reading something so profound that, if it had of happened as planned, it would have been one of those landmark events that changed our Company forever. (above Herb Kelleher and Rollin King)
Rollin and Lamar Muse
I was looking through LUVLines from 1986 searching for information about a photo that was shot at the 15th Anniversary Awards Banquet. I looked in the June issue first, and didn’t find it, so I checked the next issue, which was August. I didn’t find it there either, but I did find a short article from Southwest Cofounder, Rollin King. Actually, Rollin had written the piece for the June anniversary issue, but it arrived too late and was carried over to August. In it, he talks about shaking Captain Salazar’s hand before closing the door on our first scheduled flight. He also reminisces about the dedication of the Rollin W. King aircraft. And then comes Rollin’s description of a historical nugget about which I was totally unfamiliar. He writes:
One of the funniest things that has happened to me at Southwest was an event that never took place. In early 1968, myself and two other members of our Board, Robert S. Strauss and John D. Murchison, almost completed a merger of Trans Texas Airways with Southwest Airlines, where Southwest would have been the surviving carrier. We negotiated with the representative of the then owners and had a deal so close to being made that it was just a matter of crossing some t’s and dotting some i’s. At the last minute, they walked away from the deal, and we never knew why. The funny thing is that, except for that mercurial act of walking away, Southwest would have been in business three years earlier, and there would have been no Texas International or Texas Air Corporation.
Wow! I call that a historical bombshell. But before you go looking at all the “ifs,” keep in mind that, especially under Civil Aeronautics Board regulations, airline mergers were tedious, politically charged affairs that could take up to years for approval, so there is a good possibility that the merger might never had happened, even if all parties had agreed. Still, if it had happened, you have to think Southwest/Trans Texas would have moved to DFW Airport. Without the Texas Air Corporation, their later mergers with PeoplExpress, Continental, New York Air, Frontier, and the acquisition of Eastern might not have happened.
Yes, this nonevent gives us a lot of fodder for speculation, but we already have a bucketful of “what ifs” to ponder. What if Herb had taken a job on Wall Street instead of moving to Texas? (Or had chosen Houston over San Antonio?) What if Rollin hadn’t needed a lawyer? What if the “Over the Hill Gang” had opted for retirement instead of a new three-aircraft airline? What if Colleen had never left Bellows Falls? We will never know because fate conspired to select the path that Southwest has followed for 40 years. In that respect, fate has shaped the company we are and the culture we cherish.