Sometime during his childhood in South Windsor, Conn., Don Burr, now 42, discovered three truths about himself that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Whenever he did something he liked, Burr noticed, he invariably did well at it. And, resting on the same ledge of raw self-awareness, he found two other items of interest. For one thing, he liked planes. Every Sunday he badgered his parents into driving him to Hartford/Brainard Airport. There he would lose himself in the wide-eyed splendor of man-made flight. For another, he liked business.
"I used to go into the candy store," he says, "and wonder how that guy ran that store. I thought I could never do that -- run a store, order all those things. Kids would talk about Mickey Mantle hitting home runs. I thought that was great how that guy ran that store. I've always been like that. I've always wanted to know how you put those things together."
After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1965, Burr became a securities analyst for National Aviation Corp., a closed-end investment company based in New York City that specializes in airline and aerospace securities and venture capital. Six years later, he was elected president of the company. At 31, Burr was already an expert in the economics and financial strategies of starting and running a commercial airline.
One of the airlines in the National Aviation portfolio was Houston-based Texas International Airlines Inc., a regional-service airline that, according to Burr, had a long history of mismanagement and had a huge working-capital deficit. Texas International asked Burr if he would help bail it out, and he accepted. Burr was getting closer to his own candy store.
Burr's careful study of the airline industry as a securities analyst didn't fail him. He recalled that during the early 1960s, Pacific Southwest Airlines in California had used low-price fares as a marketing strategy to increase traffic. In 1976, Burr, faced with a similar problem, dusted off the idea, dressed it up a bit, and introduced "Mr. Peanut" as the embodiment of Texas International's new, low-cost "peanuts fares" between selected cities. "There were lots of arguments inside Texas International about peanuts fares," remembers Burr, "and somebody told me later that they burned Mr. Peanut in effigy."
But the plan worked. As traffic rose so did profits, and so did Burr. In 1976, he was made chief operating officer and in June 1979, president. Six months later, he resigned. Mr. Peanut would soon find a new identity in Newark.
When Burr left Texas International, he had no specific direction in mind. Congress had passed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which freed existing airlines to compete aggressively in both route selection and pricing, and encouraged new entrants. Burr sensed that the end of 40 years of control by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) created an historic moment exactly when he was looking for a new challenge. At the same time, he was disturbed by a kind of free-floating, and growing, dissatisfaction with what he viewed as typical corporate attitudes toward employees. "Most organizations frustrate people who really want to work," he says. "They control them, and watch them, and check up on them. They subsume the individual. They consider them guilty until proven innocent."
At first, he waited for greatness to be thrust upon him. After all, he was only 38 and he had already been president of two companies. He was well known in the industry and well connected on Wall Street. "I was thinking that I'll get some calls for sure. There must be a lot of people out there who want somebody like me to run their airlines. But did I get any substantive calls? My mother called and that's pretty much it. That's when I realized that the world really didn't care whether I got up in the morning; it didn't give a damn. But is that bad, is that immoral? No, that's life. That's the way it is. No one would have me, so I had to start my own."
When friends or business associates talk about Donald Burr today, they invariably say, "He could've been a preacher." They don't say "minister," or "reverend," or "clergy." They say "preacher" because it conveys exactly the right sense of sweating-in-a-hot-tent, evangelical fervor that makes the pulse race. Burr works hard when he talks. He paces; he sits; he stands, he throws out his arms; he condemns and praises, implores and jokes. He moves effortlessly from the blunt, almost slang, of a working-class neighborhood to the polished diction of the corporate boardroom. And all the while, there never seems to be any doubt that he can do exactly what he says he will.
Little wonder, then, that Gerald L. Gitner, his senior vice-president of planning and marketing at Texas International, and Melrose Dawsey, Burr's executive assistant, both risked their careers by resigning a day after Burr. They didn't know what they could earn, if anything, or what they would do, but it didn't matter Burr had set out on a great adventure and they wanted to go along.
This band of fellow travelers that Burr remembers as "three lonely people standing on a street corner" soon moved inside when they took space in a "rent-an-office place of the type used by fly-by-nighters" in Houston. During the day, they read trade journals and made calls to friends in the airline industry, trying to unearth an appropriate opportunity for themselves. Between calls, they passed the time by daydreaming out loud about starting a new airline: If you could, how would you organize it? Where would you get the money? What kinds of planes would you use? What airports, and, wouldn't it be nice? Then one day, imperceptibly, daydreaming turned to planning and commitment. It would be a candy store on a grand scale. Burr sold off his car, his house, two condominiums in Park City, Utah, and one in Vermont, his Texas International stock, and he drained his savings so he could put $350,000 into the new venture. Gitner invested $175,000, and Dawsey, $20,000. On April 7, 1980, they incorporated People Express, a new commercial airline whose very name, in Burr's opinion, put first things first.
