Oral History Program Dick Mayfield Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 26 February 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dick Mayfield Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 26 February 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: Mayfield, Dick, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman, 26 February 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 Dick Mayfield. It was conducted on February 26, 2021 at Dick Mayfield’s home. Mayfield discusses his experiences growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, and his later career working with missiles, and the effects of the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure he saw at Hill Air Force Base. The interviewer is Alyssa Kammerman. Also in the room is Lorrie Rands and Dick’s wife, Diane Mayfield. AK: Today is February 26, 2021. We are speaking with Dick Mayfield about his experiences at Hill Air Force Base. My name is Alyssa Kammerman and I'll be conducting the interview. Lorrie Rands is on the camera and Diane Mayfield is with us as well. DiM: I'm his second wife. His first wife is Gale. She's deceased. AK: Okay, thank you. So, Dick let's just start out with where and when were you born? DM: I was born in Farmington, July 9, 1932. AK: What do you remember of growing up in Farmington? DM: Well, we had a farm, a raspberry farm that we picked raspberries in. We picked 26 cases of raspberries a day and we had about 100 cherry trees. That was my grandma’s. When I was born, there were three families in the house: our family— my dad and my mother and me—and my aunt and uncle, and my grandpa and grandma. Grandpa and grandma owned the house, but it was just after the Depression, so nobody had any money. Well, we didn't have any so we all lived there together for maybe two or three years. AK: Okay, so you were about two when you when your family moved out of your grandparents’ house? DM: Yeah, probably. AK: Where did you go from there? 1 DM: I went down on Clark Lane, State Street, which ever one you want to call it, it's both. We lived there for about a year and then moved to Salt Lake. AK: So you mostly grew up in Salt Lake then. DM: No, I lived in Salt Lake until 9th grade, and then we moved back to Farmington. I've been here ever since. We traveled and lived in a lot of places when I was working for the Air Force. I did a lot of traveling and stayed in places for six months and stuff like that. AK: Okay. What elementary school did you go to? DM: I went to two. I went to Grant Elementary in Salt Lake and Wilson Elementary in South Salt Lake. AK: What do you remember of living in Salt Lake at that time? DM: The streetcars going down the middle of the street, little stores. The stores were very little. I remember one time a guy, the chimney was blocked, so he put a can of tomato soup on the stove that blew up and hit the chimney, and all the soot came out. But they used to have problems like that a lot. I remember going down the Mill Creek and fishing, and there was a slaughterhouse down there and we used to go ride their sheep. We rode up to the Capitol building on our bikes and up Mill Creek and stayed overnight. You know, things that boys did. AK: What brought your family to Salt Lake? DM: Oh my dad worked in Salt Lake at the DNRG railroad. AK: What did he do? DM: He was a clerk. AK: Okay, that's very cool. What do you remember of World War II? DM: Well, I remember when it started we were in Salt Lake, and grandpa and grandma still lived here, but they lived here until they died. We were coming out here to visit them on December 7th, and we pulled into the yard and went into the house and 2 grandpa said, “Sit down, listen, we are at war.” It was on December 7th because we could do that on weekends, you know, because nobody worried that much then. AK: You were nine years old. Did you understand? DM: Oh yeah, quite a bit. I remember having the rationed sugar. They had ration stamps then for gas and for sugar and a lot of stuff, and nylon stockings. You couldn't even buy nylon stockings then for my mom. I remember we had a garden there, but we came out here and help. I had a grandpa in Centerville—Duncan, my mother's dad—and he had a big farm and Grandpa and Grandma Mayfield still had that big farm. So we'd come out on the weekends and help harvest this stuff and help with the cleanup, plow and pour fertilizer and stuff like that. AK: So your garden that you had out in Salt Lake, was it one of those little victory gardens? DM: Yeah. AK: What did you grow in it? DM: Well, corn and peas and beans and carrots, a lot of stuff. It wasn't a big patch like we grow now, but it was a row or two of each kind. AK: Did you start growing that because of the war, or did you always have a garden? DM: It was kind of during the war when we started. I know they said everybody should grow a victory garden, but nobody had a cultivator then, so my dad got a digging fork, went and dug up, it was probably 25 by 25, something like that. It wasn't big, but he dug that up and planted the garden, and it came up so good that all the neighbors started doing the same thing. AK: Did you have a job at all during that time? The war would have ended when you were 14. DM: Yeah, my uncle Leo lived in Centerville and he had a big farm, so I'd go out in the summer, when we lived in Salt Lake most of the time, go out and work for him for a 3 couple of weeks and then go home for a few days, then come back out, go down to grandma's and help her and grandpa. I mostly picked cherries, other people picked the raspberries. I didn't like picking raspberries. AK: How come? DM: It takes too long to pick an entire... I remember when I was little, maybe four or five, Grandma said, “Here, I'll give you 10 cents if you pick this cup full of raspberries. I said, “OK.” I got about half done and I said, “It isn't worth it, Grandma. I don't want to do this anymore,” so I gave it back to her. AK: How much were you paid for the jobs that you did at your uncle's farm? DM: Like ten dollars a week. It wasn't much, but, you know, it was good work, it was healthy work, so, yeah. AK: Did you use that money to help out your family or were you allowed to spend it? DM: Yeah, no, I used it mostly to buy my clothes for school, and some other things, but not much. We didn't have a lot of money, even during the war. Dad started making quite a bit after the war started, but people were really poor up until the war started. AK: So you said your dad was a clerk, did he make a decent amount after the war or during the war? DM: Both, yeah, until he died. Dad died real young, he was 53 when he died. AK: I know the railroad made a big difference in Ogden during World War II. How did it affect Salt Lake? DM: It was the same way. It was a Roper Yard, a big yard like the Ogden Yard is. You know, where all the train tracks are? Same thing down in Roper, which is 27th South, down to 33rd South, like in that area, and then about 8th West or something like that. I don't remember exactly. AK: Did you have a lot of war workers come through Salt Lake? 4 DM: Yeah, we did. But I remember, when I was 14, we moved back to Farmington and the orchard next to us was even bigger than ours was—it was like 200 trees, and they would have prisoners of war from the Navy base up in Clearfield come down there and pick cherries all day. They had a guard and he was walking—there's a dam up in Farmington—he was walking out by the dam and they were picking and I said "How come you let ‘em go like that?" He says "They don't even want to go home." Because the war wasn't good for Germany, you know. Some of them were Italian prisoners too, and they brought bottles of water with them and then they would pick the cherries and put it in the bottles of water, take it back and make wine with the stuff that they picked. AK: That’s super interesting. Were you told not to talk to the prisoners? DM: No. Actually, they taught us, take a cherry pit, put in your finger and go like that, and you could flip it a long ways. We used to have fights with them with that, you know, kind of fights, just to play around. We talked to them about what they did at home and their homeland. Course, they were lonely for their homeland, but they didn't want to go back ‘til it was over. Everybody could tell it wasn't too long ‘til it would be over. AK: What do you remember of the day that the war ended? DM: Well, 1944, 1945, we lived in Salt Lake then. And I remember people running red lights and everything, and my dad says, “We're going home and stayin’ there until this calms down.” People were just going nuts because it was over. You know, yelling and letting off firecrackers and shooting guns in the air running around doing funny things. Lost sound for 14 minutes AK: Okay, are we recording again? 5 LR: Yep. AK: Okay, we were talking about how you would go out to other bases to help test their equipment, from Hill Air Force Base, and one time you went to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. DM: It's in Rapid City, South Dakota, yeah. I went there. Actually, I drove up there with some other guys and we rented a hotel, and after about a week, I got lonely for my family, so I came home and took them back up too. AK: How long were you typically at the other bases for the testing and everything? DM: It was about three months. There was quite a few bases, we went to Ellsworth, and then over to Gettysburg, South Dakota. AK: Okay, perfect. So during this time, I know the 50s was the Korean War, and then I think it was the 60s was Vietnam, is that correct? DM: Yes. AK: How did that affect your work? DM: Well, the Korean War gave us a lot more work, and so did Vietnam, because we had airplanes going over there and they had to be repaired, but in ‘59 I switched over to missiles. AK: Was that when you were doing the repair work? DM: I was a technician. What we did, we were responsible for making sure all the missiles worked all the time. AK: How did you make sure the missiles worked? Were you testing on them? DM: Yeah, missiles are tested. Every 30 seconds they’re tested to make sure everything's working on ‘em, so that's how we tell. And then it would say, like, the equipment that’s supposed to fire is not working, so the technicians that were in the field would go check them, and then they'd pull them apart, put a new part in, send 6 the part back to Hill Field. I didn't work on those. I was just a technician that was supposed to tell them how to keep it going. AK: Would that be partly because of that accident that had happened a few years previous? DM: Not really. It's the way airplanes and missiles and everything is. You just always have to have tests for them. When I was a technician, we went up to… Oh, what was that, it was in the middle of Washington. I can’t remember the name of it. Anyway, we went there, and they had a state center, which was where they send all the radar towers, like up on top here. They had those all along the border and then they'd send the information back to the state center. There was a state center that— Larson Air Force Base was where it was in Washington—and they had a onemegabyte computer that was three times as big as this house. You know, your watch has more than that in it now. But you know what the problem was, you had to have a lot of power to run it. Now you don't have hardly any power to run ‘em. You’ve got a little battery in there or something. AK: Yeah. Was the power source from the radar towers then? DM: No, it was actually six 12-cylinder diesel generators running full time to have enough power to run that computer. One megabyte. LR: Yeah. One megabyte. DM: That's like nothing now. LR: Yeah, it's not even worth measuring now. DM: Oh, no. Yeah. LR: Wow, twelve diesel generators. DM: Uh-huh. AK: That's amazing. 7 DM: Yeah, they were big generators, bigger than the ones in trucks. They were big things. AK: What did they use that computer for? DM: They would track all the airplanes that were coming over the borders and that information would be sent back to the computer state centers. There was several of them, and that one had to be in our area, so we'd have to do their test equipment. AK: That's pretty cool. So how long did you work in that capacity as a missile technician? DM: 1955 to 1985. I wasn't a technician when I quit, but I had been. I was the boss for a while, for about like five years. AK: But still working in missiles? DM: Uh-huh. AK: What kind of evolution did you see with missile design and also the politics around their usage? DM: Yeah, we started out with Minuteman missiles. Well, there was a lot of missiles, but Minuteman missile became the best one because you could put it in a silo and not worry about having to have gas or anything for it. It had its own gas in it so that nothing would happen. That was a “Missile A” and it had one warhead on it. We went to “Missile B,” which was solid propellant, so they didn't have to do anything with the motors except check them, and they’d check like seven a year. They test far out at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They made the B, and it was a solid propellent, then we went to F, which had a solid propellant, but it had three warheads—the others only had one. And then we were making a whole new missile and seeing what we could do. We ended up with the Peacekeeper missile. Maybe you’ve never heard of that, because it went away. When we got that built and test fired, we actually went to Vandenberg Air Force Base, flew a missile out into the 8 ocean, and told Russia where it would hit, and it hit right where we said, within three yards. The others, like the Minuteman and type and those, were like CEP was 15 miles. The CEP on this missile, Peacekeeper, was nine yards. So if we hit within nine yards, nothing was there. Then they said, “If you'll do away with the Peacekeeper, we'll take down the wall.” That's one of the things that put them taking down their wall over there. AK: The Berlin Wall? DM: The Berlin Wall, uh-huh. AK: Okay, interesting. What came after the Peacekeeper missile? Was that the ICBM? DM: Yeah. But, you know, that's about when I retired, ‘85. AK: That's a good point. Interesting. Were you sad to see the Peacekeeper missile go? It sounds like it was amazing. DM: Not really. But, you know, I kind of didn't want ‘em to do it because I wanted to keep that protection. Ten warheads, and it can shoot within 800 miles one way and 500 miles wide, any place in there, and it can hit within nine yards. Everything in that area is dead if they wanted to be. AK: That's amazing. LR: I see now why they made the deal. DM: Oh yeah. At one time we had a missile warhead. It would blow off the missile out in the field. It was Titan missile down in… I think it was Georgia. Down that way somewhere. But anyway, it blew off and flew into a field and it had cows in the field. So they went and got it, came back, and they said, “Watch and see, them are going to be the most expensive cows in the world.” They were so expensive—because they had to pay for them, because they had got a little bit of fusion into them. AK: That is interesting. So they had to kind of pay for the nuclear damage that they had created there. 9 DM: Yeah. AK: That's crazy. So, while you were still working at the base, I think 1977 was the first Base Realignment and Closure round. Did that affect Hill Air Force Base at all that you remember? DM: ’77? Not that I know of. The only thing I know of that, you know, Hill Field is the only base that has missiles, so they couldn't change that, so I didn't know anything. They may have changed some of the aircraft, but I don't know anything about those. AK: Okay, so it wasn't much of a threat. DM: Nuh-uh. AK: So, Sarah mentioned in her notes here that she read a retirement announcement from 1988 that said that most of the other people who were retiring at the same time as you had been there about as long as you had. She was wondering, why do you think people stayed at Hill Air Force Base as long as they did? DM: Oh, I stayed because it was such an interesting job. You know, every day something new. It wasn't like going there day after day, doing the same thing. We had a missile blow up or we had a truck wrecked or something with a missile on board, and Peacekeeper Missile took three trucks to carry it. It only took one truck for Minuteman because it had such big motors and warheads and stuff. AK: Was Hill Air Force Base a pretty good employer as well? DM: I thought it was, yeah. Real good. AK: Did you live on base or in the community? DM: No, actually, I lived in that house and this house. I built that house, and that house, and this house. When I went to college, I was going to be a carpenter and I went to college for a year and then my brother-in-law said, “You ought to be an engineer,” so I went to University of Utah for a year, then back to Weber because they had classes I couldn't get at Utah. You'd think that would be the other way around, 10 Weber was just a college, not a university. And it was not where it is now, it was downtown. LR: Yeah, 25th street. DM: 25th street and just the two blocks up from Washington. You know where that was, yeah. Maybe some of it’s still there, I don't know. LR: The facade is. DM: Yeah? LR: They changed the building but the facade is still up. AK: Oh, really? Cause I know where the gym building is, but I didn't realize that there was still— DM: Yeah, there was a gym building, there was a shop. It was where they repaired cars, taught people to repair cars and stuff like that, and other things. But yeah. AK: Are you glad that you chose to switch over to being an engineer? DM: Oh yeah, paid a lot more money. AK: That's a fair point. LR: I have a question. How did your family deal with your leaving as often as you did? DM: Well, they were okay because I would leave on Monday morning and be back by Friday, most times. Or, like I'd fly down to Norton Air Force Base one day, maybe, and back. Or I'd fly down to Norton, then up to Seattle, and then over here. It was like two days. Sometimes we had long ones, two or three weeks, but most of the time they were two days or one day, so it wasn't that bad. And then in the summer, I'd take them with me. I went to school in Washington, at Boeing. You've heard of Boeing, I bet you have. Anyway, I went there for a three months’ course, and I took my family with me. Went to Anaheim, California, for three months. Stayed there. It was funny, my girls were in school then—the one was in first grade and the other was in third 11 grade. Anyway, they'd go to school and there was a liquor store on their way home. They'd get at one side and say “Run!” and they’d run across past the liquor store. Then, when they were thinking of building a new missile like the Peacekeeper missile, they would get a group of guys together—and women—and I was on that for the Peacekeeper. At the time, it was top secret to even say the name, so you couldn't even say it in public. It took about three years to decide what kind of missile we was gonna have and how many warheads and all that. That's a lot of engineering problems to overcome. Going from two warheads to ten is quite a jump. That takes a lot bigger motor and all that stuff. Anyway, so when that happened, when they decided on the Peacekeeper, then I was the engineering reliability branch chief for that for four or five years. And I retired. AK: When you were helping to plan the Peacekeeper missile, were you kind of helping to consult on how to keep it stable and safe? DM: Yeah, and how much thrust you needed to boost ten warheads into orbit, and what kind of platform you’re gonna put ten warheads on so you could shoot each one in a different direction, and they each had a different guidance to it, and it was kind of interesting. It took a lot of brainwork. LR: When you retired, how many women engineers were there at Hill Air Force Base? DM: Well, there was five or six in missile, but I don't know about aircraft. LR: Well, I meant specifically in your section. DM: Right, yeah. There was a few. Not as many as men, but it was quite a few. LR: That surprised me that there were that many. AK: Yeah, I wonder how many there are now, because I feel like there are still not very many female engineers. DM: Probably not because they've kind of gone down, I think, overall. I don't know that, but that's what I think. 12 AK: Yeah, possibly because the Base Realignment and Closure decreased numbers of employees. LR: That was just a thought. AK: No, that was a really good question. So, after you retired, what did you go on to do? DM: Have you ever heard of brine shrimp? My friend over here had a brine shrimp business and he wanted me to help him, so I went and helped him. We designed a shaker table. You know, brine shrimps are so little you put one in your hand you can't even see it. I put together a brine shrimp shaker, and it would shake and all the brine shrimp would fall through. But, you know, when you take it out to the lake, you get a bunch of stuff, dead ones and that. So that would stay in the shaker, but the rest would fall through and we'd put it in containers. We actually shipped 350 fifty-five-gallon barrels to China one time, because they use that for pablum for shrimp. AK: I'm not familiar with pablum. What is that? DM: Baby food. Like, baby mush. That's what we used to call it. I don't know what you call it now. AK: That makes sense. That's interesting. So how long did you do that for? DM: Two or three years, and then I just retired and went fishing. AK: Good for you. So, I'm curious, do you have any memories of the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure, when Hill Air Force Base was possibly going to be closed? DM: Yeah, I remember one of our senators talking about that and doing a lot of work, and I went to a meeting, actually, on that. But, you know, it was a political thing. AK: Are you referring to Congressman Jim Hansen, maybe? DM: I think it was Jim, yeah. You know, he's from right over here. AK: Oh, really? Did you know him? 13 DM: Yeah. AK: Oh, no kidding. DM: He was our stake president. I don't know whether you're LDS or not, but he was our stake president, and then he went to be Congressman. Actually, he was our City Councilman. He was a Stake President, City Councilman, and then became Congressman. AK: Do you remember the day when the school kids lined the streets with signs for the commissioners and everything too? DM: Yeah, I remember that. We actually have a parade in Farmington, like around the 24th. I don't think it's on the 24th, but around the 24th, and I remember Jim being in one of the cars that were executive stuff. AK: Do you remember being worried at all about Hill Air Force Base closing? DM: Well, not while I was there because nobody else could do missiles. If they took missiles away from Hill, they'd have to take every building up there and move what was in it and build new buildings. That's what started Hill Field, because we had test silos and stuff like that. We would make modifications and then go to test them on the silos at Hill Field and then take them to Vandenberg Air Force Base and test fire ‘em. You know, Minuteman missiles are fired out of a hole. Peacekeeper missiles are thrown up into the air two hundred feet and then fired, so you didn’t destroy them. Minuteman missiles took months to repair. Peacekeeper missiles, it didn’t take no time, like two weeks to be able to have a new missile firing out of that silo. AK: So you're mentioning Peacekeeper missiles, and obviously Russia made us get rid of those, but— DM: Didn't make us, they asked us. AK: Well, asked us and we agreed. 14 DM: Yeah, right. Well, if they’d take down the wall, I mean, Germany would be free again. AK: So I'm just curious about what replaced them. Was it the ICBMs that were next in the line of missiles, as far as you know? DM: They're all ICBM. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, they’re all that. But yeah, they've got a new one, but I don't know much about it because I never worked on it or with it. I know they went back and redid some of the Minuteman missiles with the new guidance system from the Peacekeeper missile, so if you shot a Minuteman missile now it'd be nine yards, not fifteen miles like it was before. LR: Okay, that makes sense. AK: Yeah that does make sense. DM: You know what a CEP is, don't you? LR: Say it again? DM: CEP, Circular Error Probability. You aim at this, and 15 miles around it is where you can hit okay. Then the Minuteman has nine yards, so that's like nothing. AK: Yeah, that's amazing LR: So was the BOMARC an ICBM? DM: No, it wasn't. It was just like a jet fighter, only it was unmanned. LR: Okay, I noticed that, they showed a picture and I thought, “This looks like a jet fighter.” DM: Yeah, it does. It has wings on it. LR: Yeah, okay. So the Minuteman was the first ICBM? DM: No, Titan was. LR: Titan, that's right I forgot about Titan. DM: Titan was, but it wasn't very accurate. LR: Did you ever work on the Titan? 15 DM: Yeah, I did, just a little bit though. Not much. We had had all the missiles at one time. Well, we did have all of them. All the ICBMs, we had at Hill Field. AK: So do you feel like the missile work at Hill Air Force Base is the thing that has kept it so vital to keeping the base open? DM: I do, yeah. I think if it hadn't been in 1995 when they were having that battle that we might have lost if we didn't have that, because they couldn't put it in another place. AK: That makes sense. What do you think Hill Air Force Base means to the community today? DM: Well, I know they have a lot of engineers up there still. They got a new one of the contracts to build a big building up there for their engineers that work for Hill Field. So I think it's doing a lot for them. AK: OK, I wanted to ask real quick too, when did you two meet and get married? DM: Her husband and my wife died the same year, so we met— DiM: Met on an LDS mingle website. AK: That's how my husband and I met too. DiM: I was looking for somebody that liked the same things I did. I like to camp and fish and birdwatch, and I love nature. One day I was going through the descriptions and I'm like "He likes exactly the same thing." Family history and genealogy, “Oh, that's interesting.” I don't know who made the first phone call. Who did that? DM: I don't know. DiM: I can't remember. It was interesting. AK: When was that? DiM: We've been married almost 14 years. AK: Okay, that's amazing. I love that. DM: We're pretty old. I'm 88. DiM: I'm 86. 16 AK: That's a cute story though, I love that you both met that way. Well, we've been going for about an hour, so I just have a couple more questions. Unless there's anything else that you would like to share or would like people to know about. Is there anything you’d like to cover before we wrap up? DM: No, not really. Other than I like to fish and hunt and we like to garden. I think—this is Dick Mayfield's opinion—in a couple of years, if you don't have a garden, you're going to be in trouble. I really think that because we think the world's going. AK: What do you think the community can do to continue to support Hill Air Force Base? DM: Well, I think that by having the right Senators and Congressmen in there, we help ourselves that way. AK: So continuing to make informed votes and show up at the polls? DM: Yeah, yep. AK: OK, I like that. Through the years that you've lived in Northern Utah and seen the impact that the base had on it, what do you feel is the overall importance of Hill Air Force Base to Northern Utah? DM: Well, I think it was—I don’t know if it still is—the number-one employer in Northern Utah. I guess it still is, I'm not sure. But they have improved—I think—everything around by having good employment and pretty good wages. AK: Absolutely. This might be a bit of a tricky question, but do you know how Hill Air Force Base has tried to position itself for the future to continue to stay current? DM: I don't. Yeah. AK: Okay. I would guess, F-35s and things like that, I suppose, just cause we didn’t have those. DM: Yeah. AK: What would you like others to know about what Hill Air Force Base has meant to you and your life? 17 DM: Well, I think people need to realize that Hill Field is really the prime employer that drives all the others, really. It's a prime payer for everything that goes on, and there's a lot of money that comes in from Hill Field that wouldn't come in otherwise. It would be a lot less, anyway. DiM: It would be a shame to lose Hill, absolutely. Utah would dry up, it would. DM: A lot of it would, yeah. AK: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you both so much. Do you have any other questions, Lorrie? LR: I don't. AK: Okay, perfect. I think I'm all done, but thank you. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to answer my questions and let me learn a little more about missiles and everything. Really, it’s been helpful, so thank you. DM: Yeah. Well, we had another warhead that went off up in Wyoming, did the same kind of thing, but it didn't get out of the silo. It stayed in the silo. DiM: We took a trip to Yellowstone and South Dakota, and I've never seen a silo, and I wanted to see a silo, and it happened to be on Sunday, so everything was closed. AK: Oh no! DM: They have a silo there the public can go see. AK: I don't think I've ever seen a silo before either, so that would be interesting to go and see. DM: You can't see anything. A hunk of cements is all you see. AK: It's still interesting though, right? DiM: Is it like a bunker Dick? DM: No, it's a hole in the ground with a big… I think it's an 85 ton piece of cement that'll fly off when they fire it. They actually have what they call a mule that puts it on, then 18 they put a charge in there, and when they want to fire it, it flies off and then the missile flies. AK: Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Well, thank you again. 19