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Up for sale "Southwest Airlines" Co-Founder Herb Kelleher Signed TLS.
ES-9760
Herbert David Kelleher (March
12, 1931 – January 3, 2019) was an American billionaire
airline executive and lawyer. He was the co-founder, later CEO, and chairman emeritus of Southwest Airlines until his death in 2019. Kelleher was born in Camden, New Jersey, on March 12, 1931, and
raised in Audubon, New Jersey, where he graduated from Haddon Heights High School. He earned a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University where he was an Olin
Scholar and where his major was English and his minor Philosophy, and a Juris Doctor
from New York University where
he was a Root-Tilden Scholar.
At Wesleyan he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. On a blind date
at a basketball game, he met Joan Negley who was a student at Connecticut College in New London. The two got married, and Joan
was the person who introduced him to the state of
Texas, which he also fell in love with, saying "The greatest
business decision I ever made ...was the move to Texas." Kelleher was known for getting
little sleep and for his affinity for Wild Turkey bourbon and Philip Morris cigarettes. He was diagnosed
with prostate cancer in 1999, and underwent radiation
therapy. He died on January 3, 2019 in Dallas at the age of 87.