Connecting flight — and history

Peyton Dauley ’24, MBA ’25, is spending the summer as an intern for Southwest Airlines, helping the company build an impressive archive of its history.

As a corporate archivist at Southwest’s Dallas headquarters, she’s drawing on her Clark history degree and her experience working in museum archives to compile and celebrate the stories of the airline’s origins and growth since its founding in 1967.

“As a student of history and business, it’s been amazing to see how the practices of the humanities are applied in a corporate setting and have this unique opportunity to see historical preservation in action,” says Dauley. “And it’s inspiring to know that archivists and historians are valued in the corporate space.”

Dauley’s typical day at Southwest includes helping the Culture and Communications team plan events for employees. She helped curate a celebration-of-life ceremony for the late Colleen Barrett, the former Southwest president and first woman president of a major airline, and assisted with an event honoring employees who had worked 10 or more years for the company. When she is not serving on the event-planning committee, Dauley works on various exhibits for the “culture centers” around the corporate campus that celebrate Southwest’s history.

She is currently designing her first solo exhibit, showcasing the “Quicket,” a stand-alone ticket ATM introduced in the 70s and retired in 2002. The exhibit will be unveiled by the time Dauley returns to Clark in August to continue her studies in the 4+1 Accelerated Master’s Degree program in business administration.

“Southwest treats their corporate campus like a living museum,” she says. “We make sure the hallways are lined with employee stories and community involvement. People need to remember that we’re more than numbers, we’re also faces. Showcasing these stories, voices, and moments in Southwest history highlights its character.”

Dauley previously worked in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum archives and for the Worcester Art Museum on exhibit accessibility. The Southwest internship is the first time she has handled items that are fewer than 100 years old, which has allowed her to meet people with firsthand connections to the objects she is studying.

Dauley recently shared a poignant moment with a woman who has worked at Southwest for more than 30 years. As Dauley showed off a commemorative model plane, the employee reminisced about that time in Southwest’s history.

“I previously only worked with objects dated no later than 1800, so this is the first time I’ve ever walked through an archive with a person who says, ‘I remember this’ with tears in their eyes,” she says. “It’s very emotionally charged, very moving.”

A unique feature of working for an airline is that interns get standby privileges on all Southwest flights. This means that if a plane does not reach full capacity, interns can occupy the vacant seats. Dauley already has made trips to Albuquerque, New Orleans, Santa Fe, San Diego, Kansas City, and Nashville, and has plans to visit at least three more cities.

“When Friday night comes around, all the interns are at the airport,” she says. “It’s been a great way to explore the domestic U.S., and I’ve been to places I never thought I would visit.”