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The Bear AND THE BLONDE

Will Herb Kelleher-the brawling, brilliant boss of Southwest-ever find peace at Love? Or will he pack up his planes and head for Houston? Will Lori Palmer-the driven doyenne of decibels-end her holy war against airport noise? Cover your ears and watch two bitter rivals collide.
By Skip Hollandsworth |

On a crisp November evening in 1980, the two adversaries met for the first time. Herb Kelleher, the boisterous, flamboyant leader of Southwest Airlines, then the most profitable airline in the country, slid into a seat near the back of the Bachman Lake Recreation Center and looked toward the stage at a smartly dressed woman whose blond hair curled down to her shoulders.

Her name was Lori Palmer, and she was addressing a crowd of less than one hundred people who were forming an organization called the Love Field Citizens Action Committee. Palmer was a complete unknown in Dallas business and political circles, with no idea about how to get things done in this city-she appeared to be just another minor neighborhood activist-and yet, even then, Kelleher sensed something about her. He couldn’t put his finger on it, which was very unusual for the Southwest president. The silvery-haired, hard-driving Kelleher had made a name for himself in the airline business because he was never-never- underprepared for anything. When he got into a fight, he was ready. He knew his opponents’ strategies as well as his own. As a lawyer for Southwest he had been remarkable, winning almost all of the company’s vicious courtroom battles, including two before the U.S. Supreme Court. He even persuaded one of the most powerful figures in Congress to back down from his crusade to limit South-west’s flights.

But here was Kelleher, in the back of a room listening to a woman who had lived in this city less than a decade tell some fledgling organization about, of all things, airport noise. Love Field, she claimed, was too loud. Too loud? Surely she had to be kidding. Kelleher had spent the past nineteen years fighting over momentous issues that forced a change in the way airlines conducted business, and now he was watching a neighborhood group complain that Love Field was noisy, and that Southwest Airlines was mostly to blame. What was wrong with these people? Didn’t they remember 1973, when Love Field was the main airport in the area and sounded like a war zone with takeoffs or landings every sixty-six seconds? Colleen Barrett, Kelleher’s trusted administrative assistant, says that when he first heard about an anti-noise group, “he simply couldn’t imagine what the problem was. He didn’t understand why people would complain so bitterly. To him, it was utterly ridiculous.” But one of Kelleher’s strengths is his ability to foresee issues that might become problems-which is why he, the chief executive officer of Southwest Airlines, was sitting there taking notes on a legal pad while Lori Palmer talked.

She spoke in even, measured tones, her gestures controlled, her eyes piercing, and even when she saw Kelleher, she showed no surprise. Kelleher, by the way, was hoping he’d be kicked out. He wanted Palmer’s group, as he later put it, to look “unreasonable and unruly. Instead, they ignored me.”

Kelleher never gets ignored. After the meeting, he came up to Palmer. “Herb’s way of dealing with an enemy,” says Rollin King, who co-founded the airline with Kelleher, “is to throw his arm around him and cheerfully call him a son of a bitch.” But this time, for some reason, perhaps because he knew nothing of her personality, Kelleher came off sounding very formal. (“I’ve always been so formal with her,” he recalls, “that many people say it makes me sound a little disoriented.”)

“Ms. Palmer,” he said. “I’m Herb Kelleher.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Kelleher,” she replied, just as formally. She then told him it would be best if they always addressed one another as Ms. Palmer and Mr. Kelleher. Kelleher had no idea she would come at him like that. “I wanted it to be made very clear,” says Palmer, thirty-nine, “that there would always be a certain distance between us. He had always in the past been able to control the dynamics of the situation he was in. I wanted him to know that this time, he couldn’t control the dynamic of the public.”

Five and a half years later, on June 11, 1986, the two adversaries would confront one another again, this time in the packed chambers of the Dallas City Council. The showdown would again be brief, the rivals glaring at one another while remaining icily formal. Yet those who had followed this often bitter rivalry knew that the scene represented a climactic conclusion to a very long and very odd war.

Over the years, the explosive tension between these two leaders has mirrored the way the problem of Love Field has so emotionally touched this city. The Love Field fight offers a peculiar and provoking portrait of a changing city in which a small group of shrewdly calculating neighbors, with almost no support from other citizens, could take on the city’s government and one of its largest businesses-and nearly win. The battle over Love is rife with business intrigue, political maneuvering, intensive lobbying, and comical blundering. But the noise controversy is highlighted by the contrast of two vivid, dominating personalities-a captivating, fifty-five-year-old business executive, as uninhibited as his flashy airline, and an intense, unrelenting woman who turned her Love Field activism into a seat on the city council and is now considered the most effective liberal ever to challenge the Dallas establishment. As one Southwest official says, “It was the battle of the Bear versus the Blonde.”



More than 100,000 Dallas citizens live within a three-mile radius of Love Field; there are seventeen public schools in the area and a few city parks, including the popular Bachman Lake. Nearly 30,000 of these people live in a section that the federal government calls unacceptable for residential living because of high aircraft noise. In this area, the cumulative noise of all aircraft operations in a twenty-four-hour period is at least sixty-five decibels; officially, it is called the “65 LDN contour” (“length of day and night”), and anyone living inside that contour could be subject, according to the federal government, to the harmful effects of noise. Experts disagree as to what those effects are, especially at the level of 65 LDN, though there are links between airport noise and auditory problems, and some tenuous links between the noise and such symptoms as increased blood pressure and narrowed focus of attention. Still, Kelleher has argued that the 65 LDN represents substantially less noise than that of a downtown Dallas street intersection. (“If that’s true,” says one of Dallas’s noise consultants, Ted Baldwin, “it would have to be a very loud, rush-hour intersection.”)

But while it might be difficult to conceive of airport noise as a significant pollutant in the same way one thinks of sludge dumped into a river, there is no question that noise in a 65 LDN contour affects the quality of life there. Conversations are disrupted, kids have trouble studying, television pictures go haywire when a jet passes over the house. In one lawsuit filed against the city in 1970, when Love Field was still the city’s major airport, a woman testified that smut fell from the jets’ exhaust onto her front yard. Another woman complained that her dog had gone deaf from the noise.

Back then, the 65 LDN contour from Love Field extended from north of Farmers Branch to south of Fair Park, encompassing 33.2 square miles. The transfer in 1974 of all the major airlines to the Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport, plus some voluntary noise abatement efforts at Love Field, have shrunk the contour significantly. Last year, the contour encompassed roughly 7.4 miles, of which two miles is Love Field itself. And it’s hard for noise opponents to boast much popular support. Between 1981 and 1985, more than 10,000 additional people moved into what is considered the unacceptable noise area around Love Field. Yes, there have been complaints, but records show that during a twelve-month period ending last year, almost half of the 623 official noise complaints about Love Field came from five houses-one belonging to Lori Palmer, the other four belonging to persons active in the Love Field Citizens Action Committee.

All of which is to say that if one were asked to guess which issue would consume city government for more than five years, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on studies and thousands of hours spent in research and debate by city staff and council members, one would not come up with the Love Field noise issue. Moreover, considering the way that large Dallas business interests have controlled city government, how could a small group of citizens who wanted quieter skies hinder an institution that is so vital to the city’s prosperity?

Love Field contributes $2.9 billion annually to the Dallas economy, according to a Dallas Chamber of Commerce study. Local property tax revenue generated at Love Field totals more than $5.4 million annually, and the 7,450 people who work there have an estimated payroll of $216 million. Southwest Airlines, with 2,491 Dallas employees, itself pays $3.9 million in property tax to the city and annually purchases $94 million worth of goods in Dallas, buying everything from toilet tissue to engine fuel.

Yet earlier this year, the board of directors of Southwest Airlines told Kelleher not to make any more capital expenditures on Love Field until they were certain the city wasn’t going to order any flight restrictions to cut back the noise. They felt they had been pressured enough by the city to use quieter jets and fly at different times, and they were giving no more. Plans for a $12-$20 million headquarters at Love Field were shelved. Kelleher went into tirades around his friends and closest associates, saying he was ready to pack up and move the whole Southwest operation to Hobby Airport in Houston, or perhaps to San Antonio, where city officials were begging him to relocate. Millions of dollars would be taken from the Dallas economy, which would suit Kelleher just fine, because he felt the city government here had never given him, or Love Field, due respect-yet they were giving Lori Palmer enough rope to form Kelleher’s noose. “If anything,” says Colleen Barrett about her boss’s legendary temper, “it’s gotten worse. He’ll kill me for saying this, but at the start of the year, it was like something clicked, like he didn’t give a damn what the city council did. He had gone as far as he was going to go.”

Indeed, as summer approached, Kelleher began to turn the screws to force a final confrontation on the noise issue, hoping to deliver the knockout punch to Palmer and her make-Love-quiet cohorts. He knew that the Palmer faction would never stop besieging the city with requests to control Love Field, but he thought he saw the chance to gain the upper hand. Besides, it was time for the chain-smoking workaholic to get on to other things. His airline was facing its greatest competitive challenges in a decade. Other airlines were slashing prices, charging only a fraction of their full fares, and Southwest was feeling the effects. The company’s fourth-quarter net income dropped 47.5 percent in 1985. Profits were sagging and passenger traffic statistics were disappointing. At the least, Kelleher could get rid of this one problem.



Herb Kelleher’s management style is very simple. He submerges himself for months in an issue until he figures out what will be best for his company, and then he mounts a full-court press to get what he wants. And he always seems to get what he wants-which has made the Love Field fight all the more baffling.

Since the birth of Southwest Airlines in the mid-Sixties, Kelleher has gone through a blood bath of legal trials and regulatory agency hearings, fighting to keep the airline in business. City governments and other airlines spent millions of dollars to keep Southwest out of business. The fight to kill Southwest became so ruthless that a federal grand jury indicted Braniff and Texas International for their vicious tactics against the little airline (both airlines later pleaded no contest to the charges, for which they both were fined $100,000). Southwest went into the brawls as the clear underdog, and they played it for all it was worth. The bullies were picking on poor little Southwest, and Texans sympathized with the airline. When Braniff tried cutting its fares to thirteen dollars on the routes that competed with Southwest-a clear attempt to knock out the fledgling carrier-passengers remained loyal to Southwest.

The headlines at the time were grabbed by Southwest president Lamar Muse, who was coming up with such schemes as busty flight attendants in hot pants and “Love Potions.” Yet it was the company’s brilliant, melodious-voiced lawyer, Kelleher, who kept Southwest flying.

Kelleher, born in New Jersey, married a rich Texas woman and let her talk him into moving to San Antonio. In 1967 a client named Rollin King, a pilot and owner of a tiny Central Texas commuter airline named Air Southwest, came to him with the idea of creating a major Texas carrier. Kelleher knew nothing about the airline industry. He had an Easterner’s vague suspicion that Texans would rather drive around in their pickups with gun racks in the back than get on an airplane. He told King that the idea was, in fact, crazy, but he wanted to try it. So he teamed up with King, and the company’s future immediately looked like a joke.

How was this funky airline going to survive? King acted as chief pilot while Muse did his dog-and-pony marketing show and Kelleher went to court to fight the rival airlines who were threatened by new competition. He never lost. “He was a master, always prepared, and never at a loss for the details,” said one of his chief opponents at the time, a boyish-faced lawyer for Texas International named Sam Coats, who ironically would later be hired by Kelleher as a Southwest vicepresident and immediately put in charge of defending Southwest against the Lori Palmer noise group. “I used to get ticked off out of my mind,” says Coats, “because in the courtroom he was so condescending, with this syrupy style, and he could get away with it because he knew it all.”

Kelleher beat the airlines in court. Then he beat the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, which went all the way to the Supreme Court in an effort to move Southwest to D/FW Airport. In the early Sixties, while D/FW was in the planning stages, the major airlines at Love Field had reluctantly agreed to move their passenger operations to D/FW when it opened. Of course, Southwest was just beginning and had not signed anything about D/FW. So in 1971, it began operations out of Love Field. The city governments of Dallas and Fort Worth were furious, thinking the Southwest rebels at Love Field would be a financial threat to D/FW.

The Dallas City Council began to look like an amateurish palace guard protecting its prized asset of Love Field. They didn’t have any idea what to do with it. In early 1974, the council voted to allow an entrepreneur to turn the Love Field terminal into a family entertainment center that would include theaters, a dance floor, and an ice rink. The project quickly went bust, but the council still didn’t take kindly to the idea of an airline in there. So it passed an ordinance banning commuter traffic from the inner-city airport, still under the belief, apparently, that the huge D/FW complex might go under with little Southwest Airlines competing against them at Love Field. Kelleher easily beat the city in federal court.

But there were other obstacles. In 1979, House Majority Leader Jim Wright, trying to protect D/FW from competition, sought to pass a law banning any interstate airline flights from Love Field. Kelleher spent more than three months in Washington, lobbying congressmen, using every ounce of charm and persuasion he had, until he got a compromise. It was a masterful performance, this lawyer for an airline no one in Washington had ever heard of, fighting the powerful Wright to a draw. Kelleher, in his greatest victory, sat down at Wright’s desk and helped him rewrite the law so that Southwest could fly out of Love to the four states bordering Texas.

By late 1978, Southwest was preparing for major expansion. A new airline president, Howard Putnam, had come in to replace Lamar Muse, who resigned after a stormy tenure. The number of Southwest passengers had jumped from 3.5 million in 1978 to more than 5 million in 1979. They now had eighteen jets. Interstate service had been started to New Orleans. As the airline moved into the Eighties, profits were escalating.

And then one day, Putnam called up Kelleher and asked what anyone knew about a couple of neighborhood people complaining about the noise.

“I didn’t think it was anything at the time,” recalls Putnam, who later became well known when he moved to Braniff in 1981 and attempted, unsuccessfully, to keep the company out of bankruptcy. “So I said we’d just keep our eyes on it.”

“Frankly,” says Kelleher, “we got back from Washington with the compromise on the Wright Amendment, and we had this sort of Pollyanna-like optimism. At the time, all the parties who were represented in the Wright Amendment ruling said, ’Herb, there’s one wonderful thing about this. We’ve had this fight, and it’s all behind us.’ So I came back to Dallas, and once again, being the eternal optimist, I said to everyone, ’It’s all behind us!’ And it wasn’t! It wasn’t!”



Instead,in1980, Kelleher had to deal with a woman from Minnesota who had graduated with a teacher’s degree and a desire to do some kind of social work with the poor. Lori Palmer had worked for a VISTA poverty program in Austin before moving to Dallas in 1973 with her husband, where she found a job directing a bilingual Head Start center in West Dallas. They bought a modest house in Oak Lawn Heights. That purchase, oddly, led to the flowering of Miner’s unlikely political career. The house was about a mile south of Love Field, squarely in the flight path of Southwest Airline jets. Palmer noticed in 1979 that the number of flights over her home was increasing. The neighborhood’s nerves seemed to be growing taut. With no experience, no knowledge about whom to call or what to do-“I think I had some leadership roles in high school that prepared me”-she decided to fight back.

It wasn’t too difficult for Palmer to find the kind of heated support that activist groups need to stay afloat. Many Love Field-area citizens couldn’t believe the city was allowing commercial airlines back into Love Field; they felt they had been given a solemn promise from the city in the early Seventies that all the traffic would move to D/FW. Palmer found people such as Bennett Cervin, a partner in the downtown firm of Thompson & Knight. Cervin, a resident of south Highland Park who was also plagued by jet noise, studied aviation law, ana even went on his own to Washington to argue before a Civil Aeronautics Board hearing that an environmental impact study should be taken before Southwest be given interstate routes out of Love Field. Though Cervin no longer talks for the record about his involvement in Love Field, Palmer says it was he who plugged her into many prominent community leaders who didn’t want the noise to come back to Love Field.

For six weeks in early 1980 Palmer worked the phones, calling neighborhood leaders about Love Field, and meeting with some advisers each Saturday morning at the home of a well-known local cardiologist named Dr. Alvis Johnson Jr. “No one ever questioned her leadership,” says Johnson’s wife, Patricia, “because she was always about three steps ahead of the rest of us. We all sat there spellbound. Here was this nice woman who lived down the street from me, acting like she had done this all her life.”

By August 1980, she held her first major meeting in an Oak Lawn art gallery; thirty-five people showed up. Palmer told them they had to be “radically different from other neighborhood groups” because this was the kind of issue that would have to be fought for years. There would be no quick victories. She also knew that the group could not look radical, like a ragtag band storming city council meetings with crudely lettered placards that demanded an end to Love Field. To that end, she recruited a group of doctors, lawyers, community relations specialists, an architect, even a partner with Trammell Crow Co., to be on the board of directors. It was a terrific irony: a so-called populist, rabble-rousing group spearheaded by members of the establishment.

Representatives from fourteen neighborhood groups made up the first board of directors when the Love Field Citizens Action Committee was incorporated in September 1980. They were dedicated to the premise that no neighborhood would be damaged by Love Field, “but there were bound to be arguments among the different neighborhoods who wanted something different,” says member Tom Golson, who later became one of the group’s presidents after Palmer (she was president the first two years). “The people living on the west side of the airport thought more jets should take off on the east side, and vice versa. But somehow, Lori kept everyone together.”

Palmer says 6,000 people joined the organization in the first six months, but in truth only a handful were actively working with Palmer on developing a strategy to limit Love Field noise. Still, they were able to sneak up on Southwest Airlines. The famous Herb Kelleher was caught napping.

“I first started reading in the Dallas newspapers that the city manager’s office was looking at the noise issue,” Kelleher says. “I said, ’Hey, there’s something going on that we’re just not grabbing hold of.’ So I went to that meeting of theirs and I realized, ’Hey, this group is pretty well prepared.’ And then I thought I better go take a survey of the Dallas City Council and see how the members stack up on the issue, and many of them said they were thinking about putting a curfew on Love Field [to eliminate the nighttime jet noise]. And I said, ’Holy mackerel! We are deep into this thing without even knowing about it.’ “

Southwest was not the only Love Field company making noise. By 1980, there were 317,925 takeoffs and landings each year at Love, and only a fifth of those were Southwest’s. The other flights came out of the general aviation community, made up of private and corporate aircraft. But Southwest was flying the bigger jets, was the most visible tenant of Love Field, and certainly had the most money at stake. Kelleher became the point man for the fight against Palmer. And in a way, he didn’t mind it. “Herb would be bored to death if there was no conflict at Southwest Airlines,” says Putnam. Plus, this was Kelleher’s kind of fight-in a political arena, where good lobbying and well-planned strategies went a long way. Little did he know that this was exactly Palmer’s strength as well. Her organization was well-oiled, and it knew how to move fast.

In January 1981, the Love Field Citizens Action Committee came before the city council for the first time to request a sweeping noise control plan for Love Field, including a ban of all flights from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m., which Kelleher had all along contended would nearly ruin Southwest’s business in Dallas. With supporters in the audience holding bumper stickers that read, “Make Love Quiet,” the group presented a slide show featuring neighborhood scenes of children and families. The sound track provided a constant background noise of roaring airplanes. At certain times, the airplane noise was increased to drown out the speaker. It was slick and sophisticated, unlike most presentations by citizens’ groups at council meetings, and it made Kelleher fume. “He was about to turn green,” says Colleen Barrett. Kelleher marched to the speaker’s podium and roared that noise was not a problem, that more noise was generated by automobiles near Love Field, and that he’d move the airline somewhere else if he had to. After the meeting, the local press rushed up to Palmer. They asked how she spelled her first name, and then they stared in wonder at this unknown, pleasant-looking, and exceedingly polite woman who said, “We are heading into a battle and I’m afraid we’ll get angrier.”

So the war was on. Southwest Airlines, which had always gone into a fight as the underdog persecuted by the bigger airlines, found itself in a completely different role. The ultimate consumer airline, which had slashed the standard air fare to the markets it served by more than one-third and made air travel more accessible to the masses, was cast as the villain. Kelleher had cultivated this charming image in front of the public as a slightly scatterbrained, temperamental, but lovable boss who had fancy Wild Turkey bottles on a shelf in his office and constantly forgot where he parked his car. In a funny series of ads about the airline, Kelleher was shown missing his plane, getting caught with an expired credit card, and then announcing proudly that the airline’s success was due to his leadership-to which employees, looking disgusted, held up a sign reading, “Wrong.” Now, a soft-spoken woman was blaming this endearing, bearish man for planes roaring over rooftops and ruining people’s lives. “It was something that Herb had a little trouble adjusting to,” says Sam Coats.

That’s putting it politely. As the debate heated up in 1981, Kelleher told members of the Dallas Pilots Association that the restrictions on Love Field were proposed “so that a few people in Highland Park can barbecue at nine o’clock in the evening without disturbance by noise.” That didn’t look good in the newspaper. Nor did it help when Kelleher called Palmer’s proposals to limit Love Field flights “insane.” Palmer, meanwhile, would primly say in her standard speech that there were many people “who believe Love Field is no longer a good neighbor,” and Kelleher, if present, would begin grinding his teeth. “It was hard for Herb to go one on one with Lori,” says Barrett, “because he was this big strapping CEO, the man who rolled up his sleeves, and she was this sweet-looking person who was, behind the front, as cool as ice. There was an incredible amount of animosity between them. It was obvious to me that she didn’t even like being in the same room with Herb.”

For a while, Kelleher investigated the possibility that Palmer’s faction was controlled by a much more powerful group, perhaps a rival airline that still wanted to damage Southwest. “If you had been Herb,” says Putnam, “and had to deal for ten years with someone trying to knock you out of Love Field, you, too, would learn not to trust anyone. It was hard for us, at first, to believe that they could be so well organized, but then again, we didn’t know Lori.”

So Kelleher struck back. After Palmer sent Christmas cards in 1980 to city council members (“Happy Holidays to All-And to All a Quiet Night”), he mounted a massive blitzkrieg. More than 66,000 postcards paid for by Southwest, with the slogan “Keep Love Alive,” were mailed to city council members by Dallas voters. Southwest funded a separate neighborhood organization, the Love’s a Good Neighbor Association, to show that Palmer didn’t hold the only view among Love Field-area citizens. His grandest gesture, however, was a massive black tie gala in June 1981 at the Loews Anatole to announce that Southwest was purchasing ten new, quieter jets, with an option on ten more. They were the Boeing 737-300s, which are 75 percent quieter than the 737-200s the airline flew. He wasn’t getting them, of course, to appease Palmer and her new allies among the city government. The planes were also very fuel-efficient But in a dramatic flourish, Kelleher seemed to put the issue to rest.

In late 1981, the city council unanimous-ly approved a voluntary noise abatememt program whereby most flights would be sent over the Trinity River bottoms instead of the neighborhood. But the council refused to order what Palmer really was pushing for-a ban on night flights that would have greatly reduced the 65 LDN contour. They bought Kelleher’s argument that the gradual im-plementation of the new 737-300 jets would take care of the problem.

But the Love Field Citizens Action Committee still wouldn’t go away. They seemed obsessed with getting Love Field quiet. Each night, Tom Golson would drive out to an elementary school parking lot and chart each flight to see if it was following the Trinity River route. Others joined a special Love Field noise committee, made up of representatives from the airlines, the general aviation community, and the city government’s aviation staff, which met each month to argue about specific noise complaints. Says Palmer: “I think there were enough in the community who generally felt persecuted by Kelleher, suspecting that there was never any real corporate responsibility on his part, and that the airline would go as far as it could with increased noise and traffic if there was no one to control them.”

“Oh, that’s just Lori’s strange preoccupation,” says one city council member. “She distrusts business because she’s never worked in it. She thinks business doesn’t care, which just isn’t true.” Depending on which side you listen to, Southwest promised back then that by 1986, 41 percent, 49 percent, or 65 percent of its flights in and out of Love Field would be from the quieter jets. There is a lot of bickering between the sides over what Kelleher exactly promised-Palmer says he is playing “semantics,” Kelleher says he has not wavered-but the flights out of Love Field were creating less noise. A consultant’s study found that the number of people affected by noise dropped 27 percent in 1982, and the decline continued until 1984. That year, the 65 LDN contour expanded to include about 6,000 additional people, which meant all the work done since 1981 had been wiped out. The noise was back to its old level, but in fairness, Southwest was not to blame. Muse Air, begun in 1981 amid promises to be “a good neighbor” and using what they called “whisper jets” even quieter than Southwest’s 737-300s-without warning began adding older, louder jets. The contours were ruined.

As a result, Palmer and her allies renewed their demand for mandatory controls. They tried to get city-funded airport terminal improvements postponed until something was done about the noise. They warned that Southwest was not coming close to meeting its goal of adding more 737-300s to its fleet. They pushed a plank into the city government’s official “Love Field Policies” stating that a “goal” for the city was to decrease noise at the airport so that by 1986, only 15,000 people would be affected by the 65 LDN contour.

Palmer also did something that put the fear of God in Herb Kelleher. Last year, she ran for a seat on the city council in the district that included Oak Lawn and part of the 65 LDN contour. She was hesitant at first-she didn’t like the nasty personal charges that could come out in the heat of the campaign-but many civic leaders told her the Love Field controversy had made her the only person with the profile to beat incumbent councilmember Paul Fielding, who had begun to look vulnerable, she agreed.

In typical Palmer style, she knocked on every one of the 5,000 doors in her district. But in an act completely out of character with her reserved demeanor, she got into a name-calling war with Fielding. They traded ridiculous allegations about which one was gay, whether Palmer was married to a black man, and why Fielding got married right before his first election and got divorced right after. It was as tacky a campaign as you can get in Dallas. When Palmer won, she yelled out to her supporters, “I beat the son of a bitch”-a rare public exhibition of her fierce drive. But surely, the one who noticed it most was Kelleher, who now had an enemy on the city council, someone who could bring up Love Field whenever she wanted.

Which she did. Even though Southwest Airlines had bought Muse Air in June 1985 and shifted much of its fleet to Houston, thereby ending that source of noise, the company was not utilizing its own 737-300s. Kelleher says he was doing as much as he could then “without competitively crippling the company.” In July 1985, Kelleher wrote to Mayor Starke Taylor and confessed that only 8 percent of Southwest’s Love Field operations were performed by 737-300 aircraft. “It was then,” says Palmer, “that I understood for sure that we had been sold a bill of goods. I had given the voluntary program five years to succeed, and I supported it, I made sure our organization supported it- and it became clear to me that it had a fundamental flaw, and the flaw was that we are not seeing the companies out at the airport doing what they very successfully persuaded the council they would be doing back in 1981.”

Palmer and the Love Field Citizens Action Committee tried to block Southwest from leasing more Love Field land to expand its operations, even though the land was to be used for a flight simulator that created no noise whatsoever. In November of last year, they persuaded the city council to hold off approving $30 million worth of parking im-provements to Love Field until the noise con-tours improved. Palmer had indeed grabbed power, and though she did not flaunt it, she was ready to cram it down Kelleher’s throat. The little dispute between a few neighbors and an airline had now made its way to a prominent position on the city council’s docket, and there was nothing Kelleher could do about it.

His back to the wall, Kelleher began mov-ing in the 737-300s. By March 1986 South west was flying 44 percent of its Love Field operations with the quieter jets. To show he was bargaining in good faith, Kelleher said that the 737-300 fleet would be at 50 percent by the end of 1986 and 60 percent by the end of 1987. But that was his final concession unless he got something in return. “I was not going to make myself a bigger hostage to a city government that wanted more and more leverage over us,” he says.

This past spring, he told the city manager’s office that Southwest was finished negotiating. He would continue to leave the option open to move the airline and its money out of Dallas. Most importantly, he told city officials that he would not agree to another voluntary noise policy unless they signed a contract guaranteeing that if any city law were passed to restrict Love Field flights, the city would be obligated to repay the airline for its $10 million maintenance center its $2.5 million flight simulation center,’ and the 512-$20 million it planned to spend for a new headquarters. The city manager’s office said no (although it now says the issue is not completely dead). Palmer, undaunted by the threats, pressed her demand that Kelleher schedule more nighttime flights with his 737-300s, which would significantly narrow noise contours. The reason: under the federal airport noise formula, a night flight (between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.) is so disruptive to living conditions that it counts as the equivalent of ten regular daytime flights. Kelleher let Palmer and the Love Field Citizens Action Committee know that he would not change anything. “I had gone as far as I was going to,” he says.

Watching Kelleher attempt to analyze the Love Field controversy is like watching a man wrestle with a demon. He stalks around his office, suddenly sitting down in a chair, then leaping up to fire another salvo. He is a man who has come to respect deeply Palmer’s talent for, as Colleen Barrett puts it, “making five people sound like five million,” and he realizes that her carefully planned attacks have always put him in the position of defending himself in public.

“I almost think that complaining about Love Field noise has become a matter of habit,” he says. “I think it’s really true. After you thrash something around for twelve years, people take it as a matter of course that it’s still an issue. They say, ’Oh, boy. That Love Field! Let’s call Southwest Airlines and see why they can’t do something.’ The process goes on ad infinitum.”

But Kelleher did have one card left to play in early June of this year, when the noise consultant hired by the city presented his report on the 1985 noise abatement levels. If the report showed progress by Southwest and the other Love Field aviation companies, Kelleher planned to press the city council to declare that the city would not impose mandatory noise controls on Love Field. Surely such a vote of confidence would bury the noise issue.

When the consultant’s study was released, it was met with boos and cheers. The results were like the glass of water that is either half empty or half full, depending on the observer. The Dallas Times Herald ran the headline, “Love Field Misses Goal on Noise,” but The Dallas Morning News announced. “Love Field Noise Plan Wins Praise in Report.” The study said that 28,900 people were still affected by the 65 LDN-a considerable drop of 27 percent from 1981, but still short of the city’s stated goal for Love Field, which called for only 15,000 to be affected.

The Love Field Citizens Action Committee called the voluntary program a failure and demanded that new measures be taken to lessen the noise. But the noise consultant announced at a city council briefing that this noise abatement program “was one of the best I’ve seen at any airport in the country.” For Councilman Jim Richards, that was good enough. He drafted a resolution that called for the city to continue the voluntary program and to express its opposition to any controls that would curtail flights to or from the airport.

Kelleher, playing hardball, lobbied city council members with one clear message. He said that Southwest’s board of directors would be meeting later that month to discuss leaving Love Field. He warned that this council vote would do much to determine whether Southwest would move its huge chunk of the tax base elsewhere.

Now how could Palmer fight that? Although she had brought the Love Field fight from nowhere and made it one of the most pressing issues of the past five years, there was no way she could withstand this lobbying blitz. It was a mighty power play on the part of the pro-Kelleher forces, and Palmer knew that for now, the game was up.

And so, she came to the city council chambers to face her old nemesis again. Though everyone knew before the meeting began that Palmer had only three votes against the Richards resolution (council-members Craig Holcomb and Diane Rags-dale were the other two), there was still an air of expectation and suspense rustling through the chambers. It is not often that one sees Kelleher and Palmer in the same room. The two adversaries see one another now only a couple of times a year. They met by chance at a banquet last spring. Herb, always the charmer, got down on one knee and kissed Palmer’s hand. But this time there was anger in his eyes. He sat on the front row, his back straight, and visibly bristled as the debate began.

A few civic leaders spoke in favor of the Richards resolution, citing Love Field’s importance to Dallas. Then it was Kelleher’s turn. He knew he was going to win, there was no question about that, and he could have given a speech that was filled with let’s-bury-the-hatchet-and-work-as-a-team platitudes. But there was another part of Kelleher, the fighter, that wanted people to remember everything he had gone through.

“Now I was not raised rich,” Kelleher said, his deep voice ringing across the council chambers. “As a result, I was taught to value assets, to cherish them, and not to confuse them with liabilities or non-essentials. For the past fourteen years, the Dallas city government has treated Love Field, in my opinion its most valuable municipal asset, like a liability.”

Kelleher’s voice got louder. The speech seemed to be a catharsis, a chance to purge himself of all the scorn and abuse that had been cast upon his airline. He recounted how the City of Dallas had spent years trying to oust Southwest Airlines from Love Field. He spoke of the continuing fight that Southwest was waging. And then he concluded: “Does Dallas city government think Love Field is a valuable asset, or is it simply some kind of can to be kicked around the Dallas council chambers for another fourteen years?”

The expression on Palmer’s face never changed. Her voice, as always when she confronted Kelleher, was as steady as a rock. She asked him if he considered the people who lived around Love Field as an asset or liability. He answered with ease, saying the people were an asset, but those who were a liability were the ones “attempting to reduce the value of Love Field, doing a lot of damage to the City of Dallas and to the people who live around there as well.”

And then Palmer hit him with the shot that had always infuriated him. “I consider after a statement like that, Mr. Kelleher, that you’re not a good neighbor.”

Kelleher returned to his seat, still looking angry, but sure of victory. The resolution passed by a 7-3 vote. Kelleher at least had the city council’s word that they were opposed to any mandatory controls on the airline to halt the noise.

Of course, a future city council could renew the debate and vote in Love Field restrictions. But realistically, it will probably be a long time before the issue returns with such raw emotion. For now, the city manager’s office is looking at ways to send more flights over the Trinity River bottoms, further decreasing noise, and it will ask Southwest Airlines about the possibility of moving more of its 737-300 operations into the night. The general aviation community at Love has embarked on its own voluntary noise reduction program.

Palmer’s crusade certainly has lost some of its power, but it’s startling to realize how far she got with it and how many people she affected. The newest president of the Love Field Citizens Action Committee, for example, is a thirty-two-year-old woman named Teann Nash who was raised in Dallas, went to private schools, and now lives with her husband in a wealthy part of the Bluffview neighborhood. She drives a Porsche and she votes Republican, and she never cared about social issues until Palmer encouraged her to help fight the jets roaring over her home. Now, she is an unabashed activist.

Palmer still thinks the noise could be reduced to an acceptable level within six months, but she knows that will now be even more difficult. “The trust of the community,” she says, “to work on the issue, to form a coalition and make the best decisions, is now gone.” Kelleher, meanwhile, is optimistic that the fight is over. But there is a part of him that will always keep an eye on the Lori Palmer gang.

“It’s like the spring,” he says with a sigh.”You always know it’s going to come backevery year.”

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