Welcome to the Engines of Texan.

Episode 10, the Texas love trying.

I'm Brandon Seale.

It was summer in San Antonio in 1966, and I know you're tired of me starting episodes this way, but this

is an important fact of life in Texas. It was hot. Which is why air conditioning from a couple

episodes ago was such a big deal, in which I'm guessing is why Herb Kelleher and his client

Rollin King had chosen to meet for drinks at the bar of the St. Anthony Hotel, the world's first

fully air-conditioned

hotel. Calahar and King were there to talk aviation, appropriately enough, given San Antonio's

long history in the field. The first military flight had taken place at Fort Sam Houston in

1910, and the first U.S. aircraft deployed in military operations had left from San Antonio

to chase Pancho Villa in 1916, the same year that the Stinson sisters had launched their

flight school on the city's south side at a spot that remains the second oldest continuously

operated civilian airfield in the country. Nearly every military aviator in U.S. history

up to that point had come through San Antonio

as well, through Brooks or Kelly or Lackland or Randolph Air Force bases, including no less

than Charles Lindbergh himself.

The first Oscar award had actually gone to a movie called Wings, which was filmed in San Antonio,

and which had premiered at the newly air-conditioned Texas Theater on Houston Street, just a few blocks away from the St. Anthony, where, in fact,

the entire cast and crew had stayed during filming. And yet despite the fact that King and

Kelleher were meeting here at an epicenter of aviation history, it didn't mean it was easy

to make money in the aviation business, as King was

...