![Southwest Airlines original hostesses in the '70s.]()
Go-go boots clattered across the tarmac as a group of young women scrambled into place at Dallas’s Love Field airport. The boss wanted a photograph. “Okay, girls,” said Lamar Muse, the president of Southwest Airlines. “Y’all smile.” It was 1971, and Southwest had recently put its first official flight into the air. Muse asked a group of “hostesses,” as the flight attendants were then called, to pose for a snapshot he planned to send to Harding Lawrence, the CEO of Dallas-based airline Braniff International. Lawrence was a bitter rival. He’d spent the prior three years waging a legal war to prevent Southwest from ever getting off the ground. But the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed one final appeal by Braniff in December 1970, clearing the runway for Southwest. “Get…
The post Hot Pants, Love Potions, and the Go-go Genesis of Southwest Airlines appeared first on Texas Monthly.