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Flashback Fridays: The Start of Southwest's Halloween Tradition?

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Aviator C

This coming April, I celebrate my 17th year with Southwest Airlines, and for all of my tenure, Halloween has been a big deal.  In my new role as Corporate Historian, I’ve been asked, “When did Southwest start celebrating Halloween?” and I don’t have a concrete answer.  I wish I could quote the exact date of that, but to now, that certainty has eluded me.  I did find a reference from 1972, less than a year after we started, about our Flight Attendants celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and Easter (dressed as bunny rabbits), but nothing that firm on Halloween.  However, the Halloween photos below help us date Southwest Halloween back to our earliest years.

 

Count Dracula appears to like this Flight Attendant (Hostess back then).  The uniform she is wearing was introduced in September 1974 and was the primary uniform until 1977, so we can date the photo to 1974, 1975, or 1976.  (Dracula’s uniform dates to the Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel)  There’s no word if our Flight Attendant was banished to flights between sunset and sunrise after this encounter of the weird kind.

 

This trio of Halloween beauties is checking in for their first flight of the day.  You might label this photo “Two Gypsies and a Bug.”  I wonder if the “bug’s” costume was inspired by the boy who stands behind Ralphie while they wait to see Santa in the movie, A Christmas Story.  Today, our Flight Crews can’t wear head-to-toe costumes, so these photos really are historical relics—but I’ve seen some good-looking Halloween “flair” out there in more recent years. 

 

Our photographer follows the ladies onto the airplane.  The Gypsy on the right of the photo has now shed her cloak on the airplane, and the bug in the middle has lost her “bug eyes” sometime after boarding the airplane.  The “wide-body” style overheads date this shot to the late 70s or early 80s. 

 

For this final photo, we have a date, Halloween Day 1977, and it shows that our airport Employees also got into the Halloween spirit at a very early date.  A cowgirl works next to a witch (Are you a good witch or a bad witch?).  It was taken at the Dallas Ticket Counter, then located in the building’s baggage claim wing.  Beyond the witch, we have an expectant mother and a “baby girl” to her left.  Behind those two is Catwoman.  Besides the Halloween theme, this photo gives us a good idea of the tools that our Employees at the counter used back then.  The Cowgirl Agent has several bunches of heart-shaped bag tags ready to use, along with an ink pad and four rubber stamps.  The bag tags closest to her are for Houston Hobby.  She has a small spiral notebook in front of her, along with a handwritten ticket.  Just to the left of her left hand is the credit card validater, and toward the back of the counter is the key pad for the phone.  It looks as though the ticket counters have changed over to pushbutton phones at this point of time.  Above the phone, and barely visible, are the buttons to select a phone line.  The edge of a white box at the bottom center of the photo is a cash register to dispense tickets.  The T-shirt of Passenger on the left says, “I am an empiricist because”, and we have no reason why that was (or even what an “empiricist is”) because it seems the answer is on the back of his shirt.

 

One reason I like looking at these old workplace photos is that, while they show the way we work may have changed, how we work is still the same.  Whether it is 1977 or 2011, having fun is part of the workday.