Though overshadowed by his more famous friend and co-founder, Herb Kelleher, without Rollin King Southwest Airlines would’ve never come to be. After all, he’s the one who had the idea to found it in the first place!
Early Life
Rollin White King was born on April 10 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio as the only child born to Griffin and Elizabeth King.
Growing up at the height of the Great Depression, a young Rollin watched as his parents struggled to make ends meet, instilling in him a drive to succeed through hard work.
Attending Shaker Heights High School, the nearest high school to his family’s home in the Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland, Rollin excelled in all his studies, but particularly in English where he was the top of his class.
This academic success allowed him to attend Case Western Reserve University, where he graduated from in 1955. In fact, his grades as CWRU were so good that Rollin applied for, and was accepted into, Harvard Business School, receiving his M.B.A. from there in 1957.
Following graduation, Rollin used his connections from Harvard to find work as an investment consultant with a large financial planning firm in Cleveland.
As skilled with numbers as he was with words, Rollin quickly gained a reputation for being the man you can trust with your money. Indeed, he was so well known that even financial planners in Texas had heard of him!
In 1962, a Texas-based financial planning firm offered Rollin a job at their San Antonio office. Offered more money and an opportunity to ply his trade in a completely different area of the country, Rollin King accepted and moved to Texas.
Once again, his skills in money management and investment made him famous in San Antonio for being one of the best investment consultants in the city.
His move to Texas also coincided with him beginning to invest his own money, mostly in local businesses, a fact that made him fairly wealthy when combined with his investment consultant salary and bonuses.
A Start in Business
By 1964, Rollin King had become the investment consultant of choice for much of San Antonio’s wealthy businessmen, becoming intimately familiar with their business holdings and life as a whole. but what he discovered shocked him…
He found that whenever his wealthy Texan businessman clients were travelling between San Antonio and smaller Texas towns, they would choose to charter a small turboprop rather than fly commercially. It wasn’t because they wanted to fly private, it was because it was much cheaper.
Upon learning this Rollin, an amateur pilot, had an idea: combine his relationships with wealthy Texan businessmen and passion for aviation into an air charter company he called Wild Goose Flying Line.
With a fleet of small regional turboprops, Rollin commenced service between San Antonio and several small Texan cities like Eagle Pass and Uvalde in early 1964.
Using his contacts from his time as a financial planner, Rollin had a steady stream of business in the company’s early days, as many of his former clients chose to use his company over the ones they’d used before.
Despite this, however, Wild Goose Flying Line was losing money.
By only serving small cities within Texas, Wild Goose had, in effect, cut off the majority of its potential customer base. People simply didn’t want to fly to these small cities: they wanted to fly between the three major Texan cities (San Antonio, Dallas and Houston).
Realizing this too late to reposition Wild Goose Flying Line, Rollin King thought it best to put the failed venture out of its misery in early 1966.
Needing a lawyer to do this for him, Rollin contracted the young, but experienced, Herb Kelleher, an associate at Antonio-based law firm Matthews, Nowlin, Macfarlane & Barrett to help him do this.
Though painful watching the last two years of his life be for, what everyone viewed as “nothing”, Rollin came to respect the young Irish-American lawyer he was working with. Indeed, he like him so much that they went for a drink when everything was over.