Oral History Program Greg Schellhase Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 9 April 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Greg Schellhase Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 9 April 2021 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Hill/DDO’95 oral history project documents the 1995 and 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process and its impact on Utah. In 1993, rumors started to circulate that Hill Air Force Base and Defense Depot Ogden (DDO) would be closed by the 1995 round of BRAC, causing state officials, local government, and local grassroots lobbying group, Hill/DDO’95, to spring into action to save Utah’s military installations from closure or realignment to other facilities. This project includes interviews from a wide range of players, from congressmen, state officials, members of Hill/DDO’95, and the civilian employees of Hill Air Force Base and (DDO). Their accounts describe the process of fighting for the base, the closure of DDO, the formation of the Utah Defense Alliance (UDA) and Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) from the Hill/DDO’95 group, and their fight to save Hill Air Force Base all over again in 2005. Also discussed is the importance of the F-35 aircraft and the “Falcon Hill” Enhanced Use Lease project to the prosperity of Hill Air Force Base and military relations in Utah. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Schellhase, Greg, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman, 9 April 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Greg Schellhase. It was conducted on April 9th, 2021 through Zoom. Schellhase discusses the challenges of closing the Sacramento Air Logistics Center and moving the workload to Hill Air Force Base. Schellhase describes the difficulty of hitting closure deadlines with a slowly diminishing workforce. The interviewer is Alyssa Kammerman. Also on the call is Sarah Langsdon. AK: Today is April 9, 2021. My name is Alyssa Kammerman and I'm here with Sarah Langston. We are speaking with Greg Schellhase through Zoom for the BRAC 1995 project. We'll just jump right into it. So, Greg, I just want a little background. What year did you come to McClellan? GS: I came to McClellan first on active duty in 1967, but then I came back as a civilian in 1981. AK: Okay. I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with what that job was. GS: Well, when I came back to McClellan, I was actually at a Reserve Air Force headquarters for a couple of years. Then as I got some promotion opportunities, I moved over to the Sacramento Air Logistics Center, which was the depot part of the operation. I stayed there from 1983 until April 1 of 2001 when we left. I just had a friend send me a note saying, "Congratulations, it's been 20 years since we left McClellan." AK: Interesting. So, let me ask you a little bit about McClellan's 1995 BRAC experience, which is when Sacramento ALC closed down, from what I understand. Before the closure was announced, I know that President Clinton came and visited you and kind of gave you reassurances that you would stay 1 open. Was that something that kind of helped to instill confidence? Or were you guys pretty sure that you would close in this round? GS: You know, we had significantly mixed messages. I mean, we'd gone through the '93 BRAC and we'd lived through that, so we'd spent a long time preparing in ‘93 and giving out messages like, "We're a joint service depot" because we were. Particularly, I was in the communication electronics area at that time, although I was all over the depot at different times and different jobs. But in the '93 BRAC I was in comm electronics, and we emphasized joint service support. We had Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine electronic systems in our depot, so we got through that one. As we came to '95, you're right, we had assurances. General Phillips, our then-commander of the Air Logistics Center, had direct reassurances from Clinton that we were going to be OK. So, that was moderately reassuring, although within Sacramento, the mayor, Ann Rudin, had not been supportive of the military. Just over the previous years, they closed the Sacramento Army Depot and they closed Mather Air Force Base. So, you know, she was just not a strong supporter of the military presence in Sacramento. We knew that was not the message you wanted to be sending out to Congress, that "we don't care. We have a growing economy in which there is the state capital and we have lots of lots of things going on here." So, you know, on that side, the lack of direct community support from the city was not helpful. But we had gotten assurances. General Phillips, says, "Greg, it's OK. I've gotten assurances that we're going to make it through the BRAC." Of course, 2 followed by the, "you're dead," message that we got the day that they picked out San Antonio and Sacramento as the closure depots. In contrast were Ogden, Utah, and Warner Robins, Georgia, where Warner Robins was the employer in that city and had strong support. Oklahoma City had been part of that institution and was supported. So, you know, there is a very different message from the centers than there was coming from the adjacent city (Sacramento). AK: So that being the case, did it come as a shock to you when McClellan was on the closure list? GS: It was. It was a fair shock to all of our employees, many of whom had looked at McClellan as their lifetime employment. This is where they started, this is where they were going to retire. I mean, I came late in '81, but there were certainly others that had been there along a lot longer even when I was there. When I was first at McClellan on active duty, I was with the weather reconnaissance unit. There were 22,000 employees at McClellan and it was one of the two major employees in the Sacramento area—Aerojet being the other major employer. So, yeah, it came as a real shock. People were going, "Oooh, wait a minute. I'd planned on being here my entire life and working here." AK: Yeah. So, where that was such a shock, was there any kind of preparation for in case you did close? Did you have any kind of cooperation from your leaders on where to find other jobs or how to cope with the loss of your job? GS: Not really. The preparations came after that. It was announced that it was a fiveyear closure period, which was both good and bad. Good, because it did give more of a planning window and a more gentle slope of laying off or transferring 3 the employees. But the other side of that is, you had to work to keep the mission together because people would leave at different times, and not necessarily in the order you wanted them to depart in. So, it was good news and bad news. But the planning for employees really came after the decision, not before. AK: Which made it rough, yeah. Once that announcement was made, how did your job change? Did you get more involved in workload transfer? GS: Significantly involved in the workload transfer. I mean, it just became your life. We had a lot of program management jobs that transferred. In our directorate was the Command, Control, and Communications Directorate, so it was generally electronic systems ranging from satellite control systems to radar systems to weather electronic systems, etcetera. So, I had a whole production area of about 1,500 people out of the 2,000 in the directorate that those jobs were affected. Those jobs primarily went to Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania outside of Scranton. One of the things I say about that period, which was both rewarding and demanding, was you got to know people at a whole different level than you did before BRAC, because now you knew a whole lot about their lives, their parents, their children, when they were in school, whether they had disabilities. "My mom has cancer and I can't move right now," etcetera. You just got to know people at a very, very different level and became somewhat deeply involved in their personal lives. Not that you could with all 2,000 people, but you certainly got to know a number of them because they just needed some extra care. AK: You were someone that they would come to for a little extra help with the 4 transition? GS: Yes. At that point, the base did one thing right—they did a number of things right—but one of them was having two employee assistants, counselors, on fulltime staff. They very much became my trusted allies and friends. One of them particularly. I mean, if anything from "This is demanding and where am I going to get help?" to "I'm thinking about suicide." You just reached out to them and said, "Judith, you need to see this person right now," and she would immediately drop things. Then she of course, by confidentiality, said, "Well, I can't tell you anything about our visit, Greg, but don't worry about this one," you know. That way we at least would have an informal way of communicating at need level. AK: That sounds really hard. How did the workload transition and base closure affect you and your family personally? GS: My wife would describe it as me coming home at the end of the day and falling asleep before dinner. That’s just because the demands of the day were very demanding. I don't think I knew the personal cost until probably a year or so after I left McClellan. You just became totally engrossed in it. That's partially my personality. I mean, I was just more engaged with people. I would go out and I'd do town halls with the workforce. With a couple of thousand people, we'd do several of them because we have 100 or 200 of the folks at a time. I put the people in two or three categories. One category was, they only have a few years left until they can retire, and so they're going to go try and transfer to one of the logistic centers because they want those last three years for retirement. There's another group that's kind of in the middle range, the ten- 5 year civil service group, and they're saying, “Okay, that's going to be a big life change because we're going to move to, typically, Ogden, Utah, Warner Robins, Georgia, Oklahoma City or Tobyhanna Army Depot.” For them, if you've grown up in Sacramento or the folks in Utah, then you're saying, well, now I'm going to live somewhere else. That's a whole different culture. Then there's the group that's only been there a few years and they're going to try and find a job somewhere else because they're not particularly invested in the civil service system, although the jobs in Sacramento for skilled trades on the production side were few because they closed the Army Depot, and Aerojet had ramped down significantly. So, there were not a lot of blue-collar jobs. AK: Okay, I have a few questions bouncing off of what you just said there. First, I'm curious about your town hall meetings. What were some of the things that you would discuss there? GS: You know, we'd talk about the schedule and when various Reduction in Forces were coming, and saying, "Okay, we've had a Reduction in Force. We think this one will affect 'X' many people." A Reduction in Force, as you may or may not be aware, means civil services are based pretty simply on last in, first out. So, people are leaving based on their tenure in the system, and that doesn't necessarily match their job. I mean, their job might be extended until the last year of closure, but because of their youth in the system, they're leaving sooner. So, part of the challenge became continuing the mission. My standard message was, "Take care of yourself, take care of your family, and together we'll 6 take care of the mission." But that got to be a lot of juggling even before workload transfer, because, you know, here's person X who is important in this program management job or is one of the few electronics people that understand the system, but he's also one of the younger ones so he's going. That became part of the challenge is keeping the mission up at the same time as trying to accommodate the people's needs. AK: Yeah. I'm curious about how you made sure you slowly let go of the workers that needed to be let go, but then had enough to continue the workload transfer. How did you work with that? GS: [Laughs] You know, it was just a continual juggling and juggling. Somewhere in this interview, we’ll talk about my relationship with Ernie Parada. That was probably the most positive because while we're juggling on one end, he's doing the same thing on the other, because people that are getting RIF-ed out may want to transfer to Ogden predominantly for program management, not for the electronic side. He would try and accommodate them and put them in one of the programs that was transferring earlier, even though they hadn't been with that program at McClellan. So, we were accommodating on both sides: I'm juggling on one end, on the losing end, he's juggling on the gaining end, but trying to balance the skills. To say it was disruptive would be an understatement. But, you know, it truly helped. With Tobyhanna, I would say we had we'd always had a somewhat competitive and adversarial relationship. Their pitch was, “Well, I don't want to take the worker unless it's connected with the workload that's transferring.” Well, 7 that was a peachy idea, except for, you know, that would mean Fred or Sally, who is working electronic warfare systems, happens to be one of the younger ones who is going to be RIF-ed out in '96, but the workload wasn't transferring 'till '98. Are they going to sit there for two years until Tobyhanna decides to hire them over? That one was I try and smile and be nice as we went back to the Pentagon to say how the workload is transferring and "How are you and Tobyhanna getting along?" We'd smile and say, "We're working hard on this," you know, and I'd think, "That son of a bitch," [laughs]. "He doesn't understand the basics of the system." So, that one was pretty tough, and it came to harm the mission as well, because some of our most complex systems, two years after they’d transfer, Tobyhanna still hadn't produced any of the systems because they didn't take the people at the time they needed to take the people. They're saying, "Well, I don't have anything for him to do if that workload hasn't transferred." So that one was tough. Ernie and I, though, juggled and accommodated a lot of people and worked pretty hard on the programs. I considered that to be one of the biggest successes. Some of the other workload transfers were smaller and they went to Oklahoma City and so on. They were less problematic because they involved fewer people, but the big ones were towards Ogden. Ernie had his own set of challenges, which I'm sure you've heard about some from him. You know, you got a busload of people arriving and you haven't 8 got desks for them or computers, and so he is going into his Air Room meetings with the general and saying, “Look folks, I have forty-two people arriving next week and we don't have the following items we need to get them just so they have a place to sit and start.” But that was, you know, just challenges on both sides. AK: Was the Reduction in Force designed to help with staggering which workloads and which people went, or was it a totally separate thing? GS: The RIF is, practically speaking, disconnected from the transfer. So, if I had 200 or 300 RIF notices, I felt a personal responsibility to deliver those to the people. I wasn't going to send them out through the mail and say, “Hey,” you know, “bang, bang, you're dead,” kind of thing. I went out and said, "Hey, this isn't you, this is the system. We accommodated it as much as we can, but this is your RIF notice." But it just absolutely, even though it was spaced out over five years, that was a longer-term. In that regard, I guess it helped a little, but it was not connected with the workload transfer itself and what the people were doing. That's the challenge: it's connected only to their service computation date. AK: That makes sense. Which of the workloads specifically went to Hill Air Force Base? Do you remember? GS: The workloads that went to Hill Air Force Base were primarily program management on, let me see—H.F. Global went to Oklahoma City, Airborne Early Warning Systems went to Ogden. Global Positioning Satellite, I'd have to remember. Out of the twenty-three program offices that we had—and they ranged from communication systems—If I thought harder about it, I would have 9 started writing down my twenty-three program offices: weather systems, you know, and so on. But Ernie can probably better remember those workloads that he inherited better than I can the ones that we sent in various places. AK: That makes sense. Did you guys receive any kind of training on how to transfer workload after BRAC? GS: [Laughs] We sure did. It's called on-the-job training every day [laughs]. So, the answer is no. We started working with the gaining center on the timing of the transfer entry. As an example, Tobyhanna said, “Well, we want it all in the first two years.” We're saying, "You will destroy your ability to support the mission of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines that you're supporting if you try and move all this stuff." We recommended like a year of training on some of these systems. "Send some people out from Tobyhanna, we'll give them a year of training along with the people we try and move on these systems." They'd come out for six weeks and say, “Well, we got it.” Sure enough, two years after the transfer, no systems had been produced, etcetera. That was part of the initial war fight between the Army and the Air Force— Air Force being me and Frank Zardeki and the senior executive in Tobyhanna— over the schedule. Ultimately, the schedule did spread out. With Ernie and so on, it was far easier. With the other gaining centers on the program officers, it was staggered. We would arrive at a mutually agreeable schedule, but training on transfer, no. You know, just looking at the magnitude in the systems and so on and saying, "Okay, this one will be easiest to move and this one will be the 10 hardest move," etcetera. AK: You mentioned the concern of having a lapse in being able to produce the kinds of the things that you needed for the active forces. Was there any kind of an effect on the deployed forces or other people who needed the products that you usually would produce at the Air Logistics Centers? GS: There's absolutely an impact. I'd managed aircraft production earlier and was out of the aircraft production business, as it were. But that transfer absolutely disrupted the production of weapons systems to the customers. I mean, they were juggling too, because they expected some systems to be produced and out in the field. But they weren't there, so they were juggling with being within their own command, taking systems from stateside, and moving them overseas because systems that were supposed to be shipped didn't get shipped. So, yes, it did have an impact on the warfighters as well. AK: Did any of the other Air Logistics Centers try to help with counterbalancing some of that? GS: Well, I can give some examples: Oklahoma City produced KC-135s like we did, meaning we brought them in and overhauled them and, tipping on a nine-month or whatever schedule, Warner Robins F-15s. When we got out of the business, being a second source on those aircraft, then that meant they got all of them. So, they certainly did try to accelerate their production. All of us used a lot of overtime because we had fewer workers as we were ramping down. They had needed to ramp up their workforce, and not always with the skilled workers that knew the aircraft or the electronic system. So, they, too, 11 were juggling. You know, there were those words of seamless transition, which were about as hollow as you could get because they’d say, "Let's cut to the chase. I mean, I'm sure you've inherited IT systems that work with them." That person comes in with their PowerPoint slides and gives you 15 minutes and says, "This is going to be seamless. You won't notice any difference. We'll still be taking care of the customers." You know, I always shake a little when I hear of "seamless transition" because I've lived with too many of them, including BRAC. But none of them are without pain. AK: Do you happen to remember the cost per person moved? GS: Never had a clue on the cost per person. Many of us suspected that the pencil pushers in the Pentagon came up with the figures of how much was going to be saved by closing X, Y, Z base, but I would have loved to see a true accounting after the dust settled—from the customers of the warfighters that we were producing systems for, to the actual costs of moving people, household goods, and the inefficiencies that come along with that. So, yeah, I have only a belief in my heart that it was dramatically understated. AK: Yeah. One of our other interviewees had mentioned that she felt like it was more expensive to have a BRAC than they had imagined. Anyway, I was just curious what your views were on that. GS: Yep. I absolutely concur with that belief. But then, after the dust settled, have I ever seen a true accounting of that? No. AK: Were there any other unforeseen challenges that you personally had to address? GS: I think I’ve already mentioned the main ones, which is people leaving at different 12 times than the job they're connected with. That means any of their internal jugglings or double down. I gave a lot of credit, and Jim Barone—the senior executive service person, the one that was left at McClellan that was the ranking one—he gave great praise for the team, saying that we did complete our mission with honor, that we worked really hard. That meant the folks that were staying— or stayed as long as they could—put in a lot of extra hours to make sure we continued the mission. In that regard, I gave great credit to the effort put in by folks on both ends to try and make it work in spite of lots of disconnects. AK: Definitely. GS: I laughed when I saw one question on your list about job fairs. It's interesting, we'd have representatives from the bases come from Oklahoma City and Ogden and so on. Because you in Ogden are closest to us in the West, that one I viewed as probably the easiest transition, with maybe a little fear over, “Is that Mormon community going to accept me?” That was the belief. I was in the Air Force Reserves, along with being an Air Force civilian, and when I got to the rank of colonel, they said, "You can't be at McClellan as both the senior civilian and the senior military, so you're going over to Ogden." So, I spent several years at Ogden in the Reserves at the Air Logistics Center, so I knew lots of people over there, and I could provide some personal reassurance that it's a really great place and you're going to like the area and so on. But there's still that fear, you know. As I watched the transition, I had to laugh because I would go over to Ogden and some of the Ogden folks I know would say, "You know, those 13 Sacramento folks are getting all the job opportunities." The Sacramento folks are saying, "You know, the Ogden folks, I mean, it's kind of an inside club and they're going to be the ones getting all the job opportunities." I thought, "Which planet am I on here?" You know? In fairness, I saw both groups getting opportunities, but each group was a little suspicious of the other. Over time with Oklahoma City and Warner Robins, there's a bigger cultural shift. While people were excited about if they'd grown up in the South, then that transition might be going home. For others, they got really excited because they could buy a 3000-square-foot house on five acres for the same price that they left this little house in Sacramento, and, "Wow! Isn't that wonderful?" Well, X many years later, some of them want to come back to Sacramento because that was their home and you're going, "I can't come back." The cost of living had turned that tide on them. So, you know, a combination of some culture things came into play. People, after they spent their two or three years until retirement, would say, "Yeah, it's time to come back home," wherever home was. But the Ogden transition probably worked better than the others just because the culture shift wasn't as dramatic after they got over their fear [laughs]. It was fun to watch that because I just personally had been over there for a few years and gotten to know a number of people and had a very, very positive experience in the greater Ogden area. SL: Going back to the '95 round, you talked about how the mayor of Sacramento was 14 not very supportive of the military, to put it nicely. What about the community as a whole? Were they supportive of the military? GS: I don't speak altogether fondly of politicians, but I would turn around and say our legislative representatives Vic Fazio and Robert Matsui, who were both from different parties, but were supportive, direct, etcetera. I don't know that I felt an outpouring of community support over BRAC. You could say, "Well, we are the capital city, we had lots going on. We were growing." One closure that maybe surprised me a little was San Antonio because of their significant military presence, but very significant difference from Warner Robins, Ogden, and Oklahoma City. It was just that the community support there was far more visible. I don't know if we took it for granted. I mean, we certainly shouldn't have, because of the closure of the Sacramento Army Depot. You know, ping! One down. Mather, ping! Two down. There's only three installations, and you go, "That, uh—" I mean, Travis Air Force Base is one, but Travis is 50 miles away and Travis is the West Coast Airport of embarkation for air. So, it was pretty stable by just where it is logistically and it's been there, etcetera. But when you ask that question, I won't say broader community support was negative, you just didn't find rallies. You didn't find an outpouring. It's kind of like they took it for granted until those, I'm trying to remember how many thousand folks were there, probably 12,000 jobs were going away. With various theories about, "Well, we've got the Big Bang Theory: we're going to have one group come in and just take over the whole base and provide jobs." That theory was dashed over time and they started realistically. But it was probably three 15 years after closure that they said, "We need to lease these buildings out one at a time. We can't expect Boeing or somebody else to come in and take over the base," because there was just no interest in that, because of how our facilities were structured. There was no interest in a "big bang lease out." I think there had been some expectation delivered to the community that, "Oh, this is going to be really fast and we're going to bring in a big, big activity and they're going to take over the base and there'll be all these new jobs that last forever." You know, it didn't work that way. After two or three years of a lot of vacant buildings, they changed the strategy and started doing it. Ultimately, McClellan has lots of businesses on the air base leased out. But it didn't happen quickly. AK: Did you help with any part of getting those businesses onto the air base? GS: Yes. General Phillips had one idea, which was a public-private partnership. “Let's meet with these groups and maybe we can interest them in advancing some of the facilities and start to court the businesses before closure.” I can both laugh over the difficulty of some of the ones that wanted to come in and pick it up, and at the same time would drive some of my workers crazy. Like one time, I got a call that said, "Greg, the union president's coming to your next town hall because they hear that you're selling the building where we do this electronics work and that they're all going to be out of a job early." Now, you know, this is a rumor. Rumors move quickly. I had the head civilian calling me and saying, "Greg, you know that the union president's coming, yes?" 16 I said, "Yes, Jim, I know. You're welcome to come down if you want and hear my town hall." He said, "No, no, that's fine. You go ahead." I started this with production workers, and they're pretty candid about and very direct in how they feel. So, I'm starting with some "boos" and so on. I says, "Okay guys, give me 15 minutes to tell you what I am doing and so on. After that, I'll stay here until the last question is answered and we can go from there.” So, I did. You know, first of all, I couldn't have sold the building if I wanted to. Second, the schedule for the release of the employees was driven by civil service, not by anything else. Privatization in place could not have moved that fast. That was a whole new legal world. Anything that happened would have been years out. So, after some of those fears were allayed and so on, I stayed another hour and a half and answered all the questions and everybody was— maybe not happy, but some fears reduced. After that, the town halls went exceedingly well. I did them frequently enough, probably more frequently than needed sometimes, but I said, "Hey, I'm going to tell you what I do know, I'm going to tell you what I don't know, and I'm going to tell you what some of the rumors are and why they're totally fabricated." I earned a fair degree of respect for being candid with my employees at all times. Didn't necessarily want the truth, but they'd at least know that I wasn't going to blow smoke, that I was there to talk to them about where we were. AK: Can you tell me a little bit more about the privatization in place? Did that end up 17 working out? GS: [Laughs] In a very, very, very limited way. I ultimately worked for a company, AAR Cadillac, building military shelters, and it's essentially the same kind of shelters that we worked in the COMM Electronics Division. We'd essentially take things that look like shipping containers and we would turn those into laundries, hospital shelters, pharmacies, virtually anything you need to deploy a hospital. That was some of the work that we did there. So, they came in after that and hired some of the workforce that we had. But I think that that took a couple of years after closure before it finally got started. To a large degree, our facilities were not well designed for large aircraft. We really didn't get much play on the aircraft side and on the other electronic side, as the workload's people would have been happy if they could have come in and gotten the workload. But the workload was by direction transferred to Tobyhanna. So, you know that part about rubbing their hands together and saying, "Yep, I'm here to help. What are you going to give me?" The answer was, “Well, it went to Tobyhanna.” Then they say, "Oh, well, I've already got a facility in West Sacramento or whatever." They were looking for us to give them the work, and that wasn't by BRAC design how it is going to be handled. So, the privatization in place being, are there similar workloads? There was solar panel workload, there was warehouses that were developed in the supply community that did pick up some of the people. You know, other warehousing, transfer operations, etcetera. So, it 18 happened on a very limited basis over time, but it wasn't privatization in publicprivate partnership where everybody could marry up and you picked up the workload, because those were designated by BRAC to move. AK: That makes sense. You said that there were certain workers that transferred with the workload over to the gaining Air Logistics Centers. For the rest of the workers, were there programs to help match them up with defense contractor jobs? GS: We didn't really have folks coming in recruiting, as you're describing. Looking back, I was trying to think if any came to mind where we had outside job fairs essentially coming in and saying, "Gee, we like a trained workforce," etcetera. You know, folks pretty much did that on their own. I just don't remember. That probably is one area that was not in my focus. I mean, I'm sure we had paper information out there saying “Go to the state” or go to the whatever for additional job opportunities. But I don't personally remember us hosting, other than the Air Force activities coming in—you know, the Hill Air Force Base folks, etcetera. I don't remember us doing that and that probably was a flaw. At least we never staffed it to happen. SL: Do you know how many of the McClellan employees actually ended up coming to Ogden? Even just a ballpark? GS: No, no, not a clue. Maybe five years after closure, I might have had something that stuck in my mind. But anything I said would be a wild-ass guess. AK: Okay, so last two questions: First is, what was learned from BRAC? Do you feel like BRAC left a legacy on how communities interact with their military 19 installations? Or how the military deals with a Reduction in Force? GS: I think there's the image of throwing the rock in the pond and seeing the ripples dissipate after that. At least in Sacramento, I'd turn around, say, “Yep, you threw the rock in the pond, it had ripples, and the ripples died away.” You say to the outside community, “Were there any lessons learned?” Well, if there were lessons learned, they should have been learned after Sacramento Army Depot particularly. Mather was a different kind of activity, and that turned into a cargo hub for FedEx and UPS, and so on. So, I just look at that and say on behalf of the Sacramento community, plunk! “Oh, BRAC. What's BRAC again?” You know? [Laughs] I just would expect that, unless the folks were directly connected with McClellan, I betcha that one, you couldn't find any lessons that were learned by the community at large. Maybe there's some by the communities that are now under threat, like you at Weber State trying to study the impact of BRAC [laughs]. I wish you well. I always wish Ogden well. Just too many fond memories and belief in the work ethic in the workforce. My personal bias, but. AK: Okay, my last question is how do you think that the community can continue to support their military installations? GS: You know, this is a comment I'd make about California: First of all, we're such a diverse state. We have 38 million people and we've got two senators and however many in the Congress side - we historically don't work very cohesively as a state. Ogden and Oklahoma City's cohesiveness politically, from the senators and congressional representatives to the local community, is far more 20 cohesive. That would be my message because, certainly, you have the BRAC criteria. You asked a question, “how did we feel like we scored on the BRAC criteria?” I'm looking back thinking, we were busy working on interservice message and some of the other things, but I turn around and I don't even remember the criteria. On the community cohesiveness scale, we were probably—on a scale of 1 to 10—we're about a two, where I'd turn around and suggest that Warner Robins, Ogden, and Oklahoma City were probably at eight or above. I think you can get into the personalities of who's on the BRAC commission and what the overall motive is, etcetera, but I think that that would be my message. Keep that community cohesiveness, give one message out from the larger community and state, and continue to hammer that home. Whether you're trading off political votes in Congress or whatever, like, "Well, I would give you a bridge in your state if you'll come in and vote on," you know. Well, the same thing when it starts coming to BRAC and some of the other things: start horse-trading early, but give one message out to the state, which is, we want this and we expect it. AK: Well, thank you so much. SL: Thank you very much. AK: We appreciate your time and appreciate your answers. GS: I wish you well in your study and I hope your study is very useful to your community at large. I have such fondness for it, that I want you to continue to do well. 21 SL: Well, thank you so much. AK: Thank you. 22