The lucky metropolis was Kansas City.Frank Lorenzo and his associates marked the occasion with a circus parade to promote the arrival of peanuts fares to the city. A man dressed in a seven-foot Mister Peanut costume waved to the crowd from a little wagon pulled by a baby elephant rented for the occasion. In the midst of the festivities the baby elephant defecated, forcing Mister Peanut to dive out of the way.Though the new route was a success, Lorenzo knew he could not survive the deregulation age on cheesy publicity stunts alone. Deregulation, in his view, had left room for only two kinds of airlines: very small ones and very large ones. Texas International was neither. On the marketing strength of peanuts fares the company had grown significantly, yes- to four million passengers in 1978. Yet it had ascended by only two positions on the Top 20 chart, to number 16. Texas International could either be crushed by the behemoth likes of United and American, on the one hand, or nibbled to death by the nimble, low-cost Southwest on the other, becoming, as Lorenzo liked to put it, “the ham in somebody else’s sandwich.”But how to respond?
