Biography|Gary C. Kelly — The Accounting Degree Finished Under This Tower

People treat airline chiefs as products of flight school. Gary Clayton Kelly finished first as an accountant on this mall.

He was born in San Antonio on 12 March 1955 and stayed a Texan. Churchill High School there had him at quarterback.

A Rice University football offer paid for his first airplane ride after high-school graduation in 1972. He took the accounting path instead.

The University of Texas at Austin awarded him a Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting in 1977. The Tower on the Main Building still marks the center of that campus.

He sat for the certified public accountant exam after that and joined Arthur Young in Dallas as an auditor. The books came before the jets.

A later congressional biography prepared for his testimony lists the same 1977 degree. The Dallas Fed and Lincoln Financial biographies repeat it.

Southwest later hired the CPA, not a pilot. The credential earned under this tower is the one the company still prints when it introduces him.

The Main Building went up in the 1930s to Paul Philippe Cret's design. Visitors still use the South Mall axis to stand where graduates have stood for decades.

Photo: Kurt Kaiser, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons