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 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 ready,” Muse said to his smiling hostesses, each of whom was clad in her in-flight uniform of tangerine knit top, slouchy white belt, white side-laced go-go boots, and fire-orange hot pants. “Now, everyone flip Mr. Lawrence the finger.”
Hostess Sally Glenn couldn’t believe what she was about to do. “Oh, my goodness, no,” she thought to herself. She imagined what her mother back in small-town Illinois would say to her if she saw the picture. Yet, like everyone’s around her, Glenn’s fist went up, her middle finger unfurled, and Muse stuck it to his adversary. “Lamar had a way of getting you to do things you might not think you could,” recalls Glenn (now Glenn-Lee) from her home in California, fifty years after Southwest Airlines flew for the first time.