Oral History Program Mike Pavich Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 10 December 2020 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Mike Pavich Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 10 December 2020 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: Pavich, Mike, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman, 10 December 2020, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Mike Pavich. It was conducted on December 10, 2020 at Hill Aerospace Museum at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. Pavich speaks about his experience with the Base Realignment and Closure and the Hill/DDO'95 group. The interviewer is Alyssa Kammerman. Also present in the room are Sarah Langsdon and Benjamin Zach. AK: Today is December 10th, 2020. We are interviewing Mike Pavich at Hill Aerospace Museum. My name is Alyssa Kammerman and I'll be conducting the interview today. With me is Sarah Langston. On the camera is Benjamin Zach. So, Mr. Pavich, thank you for visiting with us today. We appreciate it. My first question, I just wanted to understand: In 1993, you retired from being commander at McClellan Air Force Base, at the Air Logistics Center there? MP: Sacramento Air Logistics Center. Yes. AK: What brought you to Ogden and got you involved with wanting to help Hill Air Force Base during BRAC? MP: Well, I grew up in Utah. I was born in Utah, I went to high school in Utah, and I left Utah in 1960 to go to the Air Force Academy, so I had family here. My wife was from Colorado. My mother was living here, and she needed a little bit of help. Our sons were going to the University of Utah. It was kind of natural for us to come back to Utah. So, we came back to Utah, and I had been invited by the Battelle Memorial Institute to work for them here in Ogden. I was the manager of their Hill Air Force Base functions and operations. They were on contract with Hill Air Force Base to do various tasks. The Battelle Memorial Institute is 1 headquartered in Ohio and they do a lot of high-tech stuff with a lot of DOD and government installations. AK: Okay, that makes sense. Tell me about the beginnings of Hill/DDO’95. How did you and Vickie meet and come up with this idea? MP: Okay. Well, I think to start this, we need to put a little background into the Base Realignment and Closure. Base Realignment and Closure started in 1988. The Department of Defense had been closing installations since the 1960s, and every so often bases would be closed primarily by the military inside the military with no broad effort. In 1988—I think it was called the Carlucci Commission, but if you want to Google the Base Closure and Realignment Commission, you'll find all the history there. They closed some bases in ‘88, and I think the first official round of BRAC, as we look at it now, was in 1991. They had a round in 1988, 1991, 1993, 1995, and then 2005. As the Base Realignment and Closure process went along, it became a little bit more formalized in 1991. It was fairly low key, although there were several installations closed. Over 350 installations were closed or realigned as part of this BRAC process from 1988 through 2005. During the 1993 round of base closure, I was the commander at Sacramento Air Logistics Center, and the defense of the base was not really carried on by the local community because the local community—at least the mayor of Sacramento—had been on record saying she thought the base should close. Mather had closed the year before and the Sacramento Army Depot would close the year after McClellan, but in 1993 the defense of the base was pretty 2 much left to the people on the base. I kind of led that effort as the commander out there. In the 1995 round of base closure, the rules were changed so that the military could not really be involved in trying to defend an installation. They were told by their command superiors that this base closure process was a DOD process and that the local members of the military—commanders and leaders— were not to get involved and were not to pay a lot of attention. After McClellan was put on the list to close in 1993 as an Air Logistics Center, it kind of got the attention of the folks here at Hill saying, “Oh, my goodness. What can happen in the next round?” McClellan was taken off the list in 1993 by Les Aspin, who was the secretary of defense at the time. He was secretary of defense for a year (1993-1994) and he had a very close colleague from the Congress where he'd served for 20 years by the name of Vic Fazio. Vic Fazio was the congressman for the Sacramento district and Vic Fazio got Les Aspin to give him a personal favor and take McClellan off the list in 1993. So, that's why the Sacramento Air Logistics Center at McClellan did not close in 1993. I retired in 1993, moved here to Utah, and I was working for the Battelle organization. I'm not sure how it started in Ogden, but a few business people, Scott Parkinson, who was the head of the chamber; Dee Livingood of Big D Construction; Scott Trundle, who was the editor of The Standard Examiner; Lee Cruthers, the head of Utah Power; obviously Vickie McCall was involved in that; Ann Millner—she wasn't the president of Weber State then, but she worked for 3 Weber State in Community Relations. They got together and said, “We need to mount a defense for Hill Air Force Base for this 1995 round of base closure.” Stu Boyd, who was a retired brigadier general, worked for Ann Millner and had worked with me at the headquarters of Air Force Logistics Command. It was called Air Force Materiel Command by 1995. But Stu Boyd asked me if I would meet with Ann Millner and I said, “Sure, what purpose?” “Well, she has something she wants to discuss with you.” So, I went up to Weber State and I met with Ann and Ann said "We're forming this local community group to mount a defense for Hill Air Force Base and we think that you might be someone who could help us do that. Would you be willing to meet with Scott Trundle and Lee Carruthers, and have them interview you for this position?” I said, “Sure.” I met with Scott Trundle and Lee Carruthers and Scott Parkinson at some restaurant in Ogden. We had lunch and they said, “We would like to hire you to run this operation.” I said, “That sounds interesting. What would you like me to do?” “We would like you to make sure that Hill Air Force Base doesn't close in 1995.” I said, “Well, what resources do you have to do that with?” They said, “Well, you know, we're still working on that. We think the state will support us and we're going to raise funds through various businesses and organizations and so forth and so on.” 4 We had the standard kind of interview: “Are you the right person for this job? Can you do this job or do you know about this operation? Will you do it? Will you take the job?” I said, “Well, I need to talk to Battelle and see what they think about this, but I would be interested,” because I got very involved in the Sacramento side of things, and I thought this base closure process was way too political and not as dynamic as it should be. So anyway, I agreed that I would do that. The plan was for me to be hired by the state in order to do this, and that was done through the State Economic Development Organization run by Rick Mayfield at the time, and Ron Richins, who was from this area up here. He worked for Rick Mayfield. I was involved with the two of them and Rick Mayfield, who later became involved as part of the Hill/DDO’95 group. Well, the next thing on the agenda, Battelle agreed to give me a year's leave of absence while we did this project for defending Hill Air Force Base. There was a meeting set up with Governor Mike Leavitt, and Vicky was in the car, and so was I believe Dee Livingood and Scott Trundle and Lee Carruthers, maybe Scott Parkinson. Big SUV, and we were driving down to Salt Lake. I had met them someplace and gotten in the car with them. Vickie said, “The first thing that we need to do—” She was kind of operating as the leader of this organization, or it seemed to me like she was the leader of the organization. Vickie, over the years, had developed key friendships at the base here—Dale Thompson and his wife were close friends of Vickie—and through that, Vicky had become involved on the base. She was involved with the 5 388th Fighter Wing and the commanders and squadron commanders in the 388th. She had lots of connections on the base, so I think she had been kind of designated as sort of as the leader of the group in its embryonic stages. We were going to meet with the governor to ask for state funds to help support this effort and we said, “Well, we need to have a name for this organization.” We kicked around a few things and, I don't remember who it was that brought it up and said, “Well, there's also some concern about Defense Depot Ogden and we need to make sure we include Defense Depot Ogden in this effort. Can we fold that in?” I said, “Well, I don't know anything about Defense Depot Ogden, but I would imagine we'd use the same tactics for Defense Depot Ogden as we would use for Hill Air Force Base.” So, we started talking. We had Hill Air Force Base and Defense Depot Ogden, the BRAC round was 1995, and the name generated Hill/DDO'95. So, by the time we got to Salt Lake, we decided that that was the name of this organization, and we went in like we'd been organized for months and talked with Governor Leavitt, who was very receptive. I believe Natalie Gotchner was involved. Charlie Johnson was the point man for Governor Leavitt on his staff. We met and we talked with him, and we were talking in generalities about how critical Hill Air Force Base was to the local community and things like that. He said, “Charlie, I think we should help these folks.” 6 So, they worked out a way where they provided the budget. They brought Rick Mayfield into it and they hired me as an employee of the state of Utah to lead this operation. That's how Hill/DDO’95 got started, and that's how I became the president. Does that answer your first or second question? AK: That answers the first couple of questions actually. MP: Okay. I've got other members of the original team. I don't know if you've got their names or not. AK: No, but we'd love to get those. MP: Let me see. I wrote them down. In no particular order, as I remember it: Vickie McCall, Scott Trundle, Lee Carruthers, Gil Barley, who was the principal for Thiokol at the time here in Ogden; Ann Millner, Scott Parkinson, Ivan Flint of Weber Basin Water; Wilf Summercorn (I believe Wilf Summercorn was economic development in Bountiful, but I don't really remember what his position was at the time), Dee Livingood, Marty Stevenson, who was a local politician in the Utah legislature; General John Mathews, who was the head of the Utah Air National Guard at the time; Rick Mayfield, who I’ve mentioned; Charley Johnson, and Jim Hansen's office. Jim Hansen was very much involved. Peter Jenks was his local coordinator, and I think Peter Jenks is still doing the same job for Congressman Moore. But anyway, Peter Jenks was also involved. Steve Petersen and Bill Johnson were on Congressman Hansen's staff, and Bill Johnson became the key guy. Those are the people that I remember. 7 Other people came on board after that, but that's pretty much the nucleus of what we started. Those people acted as kind of a general board of directors and they looked to me to do the things that were necessary to defend the base. We sort of came up with a strategy of how we were going to do that, and then we proceeded to implement that strategy. The first strategy was: “We're going to have to raise funds,” because we were going to have to hire Washington support. We hired Tim Ruppli, who was a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. He worked for a big lobbying organization. We first went to The Carlogas Group, a principal lobbyist for Utah. They are a large lobbyist organization in Washington. I think it was Steve Carlogas, but anyway, he had strong ties to Utah. We went to their firm first, and they said, “Well, we're really not doing anything now with base closure, that's kind of a cottage industry that's developing here. We'd be glad to take your money and help, but you might be able to find other people.” Tim Ruppli had set up a small office within another big lobbying firm in Washington. I don't remember the name of it. He'd work very aggressively with several communities in the ‘93 round of base closure and the ‘91 round of base closure, so he had a track record. Four or five of us went back and met with him in Washington and we figured that he was going to be a good guy for us. He was really good. He and the folks that worked for him were really good at saying, "Here are some of the things that you need to do that have proved effective in other areas." 8 About this time, there was another organization that was coming to the forefront called the National Association of Installation Developers, (NAID). They were starting to be involved in the reuse options and how to reuse closed installations, but they were also holding seminars and instructive sessions on what local communities had done and thought were effective in defending their installations. We affiliated with that group also. We are also affiliated with the Southwest Defense Alliance. Southwest Defense Alliance started in California near China Lake, and they were an organization that was primarily in place to defend the bases in the China Lake area and in California. They didn't get involved on the coast. If you look at the history of base closure, you'll probably find that through the rounds of base closure, the most bases were closed in California. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of them speculated, some real. I'm not going to get into any of that, most of it politics. But this group called the Southwest Defense Alliance was initially started to protect ranges. Since we had the Utah Test and Training Range here— “Protect” is probably the wrong word. Their focus was keeping the best ranges and defending the best ranges and stating why they were the best ranges. If ranges had to close up, moving assets around. That was kind of their focus. They had a lot of impact in Washington, so we got on their coattails. I think the Utah Defense Alliance is still affiliated with the Southwest Defense Alliance. Anyway, after we kind of pulled this together, we started saying, “What do we need to do?” What you find out in a hurry is that if you go beyond Layton, 9 Roy, Clearfield, and Ogden, not many people in Utah care much about the Hill Air Force Base, especially back then. So, our job was to try and convince people, at least as far south as Salt Lake City, that this was something worthwhile. We started using every connection, every business involvement that we could find to go and talk to different groups to explain, “Here's the importance of Hill Air Force Base. Here's what it does for your community.” For example, in raising money: the value of Hill Air Force Base to the state at that time, 17,218 jobs, an annual payroll of 612 million dollars, and an economic impact—according to the governor's Office of Economic Development—of two billion dollars. They said, "Closing this installation will be a nightmare for the state of Utah. Not only for the community of Ogden, but for the entire state of Utah." We got a lot of people on board. The Deseret News provided money to us as an arm of the church, I think. Local mortuaries provided money to us. Local “mom and pop” stores made small donations. Different veterans’ groups got together and raised money. Utah Power and Light, Thiokol's, the StandardExaminer, all of the people who were on the board, their corporations provided funds. I really don't know how much money we raised in total. I know we always had a very, very close budget. I managed all the funds. We did it through a checkbook. That's how we paid the bills for the things that we did. We would record the bills that come in. We'd write the checks, that was our accounting process. 10 I got hired by the state of Utah, but I didn't work down on Third South where Rick Mayfield's offices were. The Thiokol Corporation provided me with an office in what was then the Thiokol building in downtown Ogden. Gill Barley provided that. After we'd been going for about a month and a half or so, we decided this administrative load is going to get significant, so I hired a secretary. Kind of an interesting little turn of events: I think we were paying something like $28,000 or $29,000 a year for the job, and I had fifteen applications from people who had owned their own businesses, who had done various things. They wanted to get involved with this and I guess they really needed the job, but I don't know, I don't remember the economy in 1993 or 1994. But I was amazed at how many people came and said, yes, we're willing to work up here. We were on a vacant floor in the Thiokol Building. My office and secretary's office were the only offices on the floor. We went upstairs to Gill Barley to get other administrative support, which his staff provided to us for things that we needed to do. My secretary’s name was Alisha, and I cannot remember her last name, but she was invaluable, just absolutely invaluable. We couldn't have done it without her efforts. Just couldn't have done it. But basically, it was she and I putting together all the handouts, all of the things that got delivered, doing all the correspondence, building all the briefings, and so forth and so on. So, we had briefings to build. 11 When we went down to the governor, the DDO part was involved, too, and we had to then get involved with DLA and the functions with DLA and determine how we were going to defend DDO. With Hill Air Force Base, the approach that we took was we're not going to fight with the other four Air Logistics Centers. We're going to take the approach that, yes, there is excess capacity in the Department of Defense for doing maintenance on military equipment. If you look at all of the military installations doing maintenance on military equipment, you can probably consolidate a good chunk of that in the existing five Air Logistics Centers and close several Army, Navy, Marine Corps maintenance facilities, which were generally smaller. They were managed differently. They were generally run by a colonel or a lieutenant colonel, where the Air Logistics Center is overall run by two-star generals. The capacity that existed in the Air Logistics Center could easily take on many of these jobs. We got in a big fight with Letterkenny Army Depot over missile maintenance, which had been at Ogden and had moved to Letterkenny, should have moved back to Ogden under the base closure process, didn't in ‘95, but did later when Letterkenny closed in 2005. But anyway, those are just side points. But that was our strategy: let the local community know what was going on, get the local community involved, get all the local communities anxious about supporting Hill Air Force Base, providing the kind of visual and written data that the Base Closure Commission could look at and say, “This community really wants to keep this base open.” 12 The same for Defense Depot Ogden. The strategy for Defense Depot Ogden was a little bit different. Probably want to deal with that in this side note on your question down here rather than Hill Air Force Base. But Defense Depot Ogden was not a "give up" so that we could keep Hill. Hill was retained on its merits primarily. DDO should have been retained on its merits, and I'll get into that. DLA changed the game. AK: You were mentioning that a lot of the members on your board of directors worked at different local businesses. Did those businesses also help with donating financial resources? MP: Financial or in-kind. Yes. The members that were on the board, their businesses would cover their travel and things like that. They did everything they could to keep our expenditures to a minimum because our biggest cost, of course, was a lobbyist in Washington, and me, and Alisha. All the office supplies and everything was provided by Thiokol. All the computer support and telephones and all of the kinds of things you need to run an office were all provided in-kind by Thiokol. Meeting locations were generally provided—conference rooms and things like that—by one of the organizations. It finally boiled down to the Weber Basin Water District headquarters. For years the organization met there, and it still meets there now. But, yeah, they all contributed in some way. AK: Why did it finally come down to the Weber Water Building? MP: Ivan Flint, who said, “I've got this big conference room, I know how to hold big meetings, I've got a huge conference table.” As the organization grew over the years, he was able to hold it, and they provided the best morning treats that you 13 can imagine. Einstein Bagels and drinks and they just did a wonderful job. You know, Tage Flint, Ivan's son, eventually became the head—and I think still is the head—of the Utah Defense Alliance. I don't know exactly when the Utah Defense Alliance moved to Weber Basin Water. Probably after the ‘95 round of base closure, but it's been there for years as kind of its meeting place. AK: You mentioned also that the Air National Guard was involved. They're technically military, but since they're funded by the state— MP: They work for the state, yeah. John Matthews—he way we divided the effort is he decided to take on the Dugway and Tooele side of things, so he worked the issues associated with Dugway Proving Ground and Tooele, and we worked the issues associated with Defense Depot Ogden and Hill Air Force Base. John was kind of the crossover with Rick Mayfield and Marty Stevens for the governor and the governor's office. Charlie Johnson also. But he was, you know, the guy that the governor went to for military things and he understood the language. He was key to the organization because he had people and connections in the Air Force National Guard side of the House that we used as we could. AK: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Also, you mentioned in order to get the word out, you had fliers, and also you gave different speeches and seminars? MP: Yeah. I talked to, I don't know, two hundred different groups, and every day it seemed like there was somebody to talk to. I must have talked to every Rotary Club, every sewing group, every school. Every anybody who wanted somebody to speak at any kind of an organization that was even remotely related to politics or Hill Air Force Base or what was going on in government, I was there, I was on 14 the program, and I talked to them about Hill Air Force Base and Defense Depot Ogden, depending on where their interests were most specific. We also had to prepare, because the Base Closure Commission— Let me explain a little bit how the base closure process worked. There is a Base Closure Commission. These are people who all have political and some sort of business background, but mostly political, and they're all appointed. I think there were nine of them. I think three are appointed by the president, three were appointed by Congress, and the other three were appointed by various organizations in the government. I don't remember who they are. If you want to go and find the base closure law, it explains it more in there. We tried to get Jake Garn appointed to the Base Closure Commission. That didn't happen. We worked that through Senator Bennett and Senator Hatch and the governor and any other political aspect of our lobbying group in Washington. We worked very, very hard to try and get him. First, we had to convince him that he oughta do that because it's a heck of a commitment. He agreed that he would do that if the appointment came through. But the appointment didn't come through. Jim Hansen did get appointed to the Base Closure Commission in later years. I think it was ‘05 where Jim Hansen was on the Base Closure Commission. But anyway, these commissioners, basically, officed in Washington, D.C., and they had a staff, and the staff were tasked with putting together the data to support closure of installations. The staff would go out to all of the different 15 installations. The Base Closure Commission would visit all of the installations. A good part of our involvement was talking with the staff. The staff for Air Logistics Centers were basically the same people that I had gotten to know at McClellan, because they'd done all of the staff work for the Base Closure Commission at McClellan. I was very well acquainted with them and what their feelings were about the fact that Les Aspin had gotten Sacramento Air Logistics Center taken off the base closure list. They were really mad. They said, "McClellan should have closed in ‘93, we're going to get two depots closed in the next round." So, that heightened our interest. But we met with them, we looked at their process, we looked at how they gathered data, we looked at what they were doing. We tried to be at all the Air Logistics Centers and meet with all the local communities that were trying to defend their Air Logistics Center to show that our story and their story were kind of flowing the same way. They all had their own internal way of doing things. They all said, "We're not going to fight each other, but if it comes down to you or us, we're picking us and not you." But we coordinated with all of the different groups. The group in Georgia was very, "Hey, we've got nothing to worry about. We've been doing this for years. You guys are just getting into this." We found this out: that Utah had not had a community group to deal with military installations. Many of the other installations around the country, especially the Air Logistics Centers, did. Warner Robins was probably the best organized. They'd been involved with that for a long time. Sam Nunn, who was 16 chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the Congress, was their umbrella cover, and he was going to take care of them. He clearly did, you know. Oklahoma City was the largest Air Logistics Center. They were going through some new congressional changes, but they had a fairly sophisticated group at Oklahoma City, but they didn't worry very much because they were so big, about twice the size of the other depots. It would have been difficult to close Oklahoma City. San Antonio said, “We are the largest employer of Hispanics in the government. Nobody would ever dare close a base like this, with that kind of political impact and that kind of lobbying system that is going to be built.” So, it came down to Sacramento and Ogden: the two smallest. Sacramento was the smallest. Ogden and Warner Robins were about the same size. Sacramento, local officials were on record saying, "We'd just as soon see this base closed." Seemed to be an easy pick. Ogden, not really. It's a heavily Republican state. Bill Clinton was president, and very little political impact or political price to pay if you closed Ogden. So, the politics seemed to lean toward Ogden and Sacramento, which is why when General Yates met with us, he said, "If I have to offer two bases, I'm offering McClellan and Hill." It didn't work out that way because the commands were not asked to offer specific bases. They said, “We're going to look at all of them.” What was done in all the major commands across the Air Force, Army, and the Navy is, they said, “Here are bases you can't touch.” The Air Force had Nellis Air Force Base, Langley Air Force Base, Offutt Air Force Base, typically major installations, command centers, headquarters SAC, headquarters Air Combat Command, 17 Wright Patterson, you know, headquarters for Materiel Command. None of their headquarters bases. Eglin Air Force Base, which was the Prime Florida range installation, but several, maybe twenty-five, thirty Air Force bases. Similar in the Army and the Navy, “These are bases you can't touch. These are national assets, stay away from those.” None of the Air Logistics Centers were on that list, so they were all fair game. So, we worked with the congressional delegation of the other states where there were Air Logistics Centers, trying to work through their congressional folks and dealing with the Base Closure Commission up there. There was an organization that was put together in Congress called the Depot Caucus, which was basically the congressional delegations, primarily in the House, that had Air Logistics Centers in their states. Jim Hansen was tremendous. If anybody saved Hill Air Force base single handedly, it was Jim Hansen. Jim Hansen says it's me, but I say it's Jim Hansen. We could not have gotten anything done without Jim Hansen. He was a trooper. Senator Bennett and Senator Hatch helped. Senator Bennett significantly out front, Senator Hatch a lot behind the scenes. The congressional delegation for Utah did themselves very, very proudly in the saving of Hill Air Force Base and opening the doors to allow us to talk to people and working with the Congress, The Depot Caucus, and other folks, and calling in what favors they could at times that they could. Anyway, getting back to the process: meeting at all the Air Logistics Centers when the Base Closure Commission was there, hosting them here, 18 working with Hill Air Force Base to provide the story and the data, trying to demonstrate the difficulties with closing Hill Air Force Base and what that would do. Again, I'm going to talk about DDO in a minute, but the computed tomography and the ICBM missile range is a one-of-a-kind operation. The cost to move that was significant, which was one of the key players. There was a lot of discussion about having that stay here and closing the rest of the base and do what they call a GOCO, Government Owned Contractor Operated, type of effort. We presented the case against that. The base was not supposed to help us. Les Lyles, who was the commander, said, "My hands are really tied in what I can do. I can't talk to the Base Closure Commission, I can't provide you with confidential information that only people in the command are supposed to have, like what's the strategy inside the command on how we're going to deal with this base closure stuff." He says, "I will let you work with a couple of people on the base here who are involved in this process, because there's workload that we're trying to get shifted to Hill Air Force Base." That was primarily the Letterkenny missile operations. A lady by the name of Jeanie Hathenbrooke, who was the principal leader in that organization, was very much involved and worked with us. Her husband, Gene Hathenbrooke, who was a senior civilian on the base, was a good point of contact for having access to generally published data about the base and pulling it together so that we could put it together in briefings and talking papers and OpEds and different things like that. 19 Our dealings with the base were much different from when I was the commander at Sacramento and I basically led the charge to save the base as the commander. Les could not do that. He was hamstrung from that, and in the next round of base closure it got even worse. They couldn't even talk to people. As it ramped up and the bases that they were closing got bigger and bigger, it became more difficult. We had good relationships with the base. We worked with the base, used the briefing rooms at the base to talk to various groups that would come on base and we would present the case. When finally push came to shove, the big issue, you've got the Base Closure Commission sitting there in the conference room on the Hill Air Force Base, and I'm up on the stage saying, "This is why you shouldn't close this installation, this is what the community feels about this, and this is why we think that it's not a good idea. This is why we think you should move workload to the five ALCs," and all of that stuff. Hour and a half-type briefing, so to speak. The Base Closure Commission goes away and they crunch all their numbers and they come up with a recommendation. They make this recommendation to the commissioners. The commissioners sift through all the recommendations and make decisions and come up with a recommended list of base closures. They sent that to the president and the president is either yes or no on the whole list, can't cherry-pick. Then it goes to Congress, and Congress has to pass a law saying these are the bases that are going to close and they have to do it up or down. They 20 can't take off any like Les Aspin did in the ‘93 round. Then that becomes law and the base closes, and then the property is disposed of under the Base Realignment and Closure Act of 1990, which are all the ways that the Department of Defense can dispose of property. We basically spent a year traveling around giving briefings on Hill Air Force Base and defending Hill Air Force Base and why it should stay open. The briefings were very good. I mean, they were very convincing and they presented hard data. It wasn't just the impact on the community, it was why you need to do it at Ogden Air Logistics Center versus move it to someplace else. As you all know, San Antonio and Sacramento were on the list to be closed. San Antonio, we believed, was the least efficient depot in all five of the Air Logistics Centers. There is another dynamic going on underneath this base closure process, and I'll give you a little insight into that, because I was involved in it. The two commands prior to the ‘93 round of base closure, Air Force Systems Command and Air Force Logistics Command, merged into Air Force Materiel Command, making it the largest command in the Air Force with the most bases. The Systems Command side of the puzzle was acquisition and management of acquisition of weapons systems. The Logistics Command side was maintenance and lifecycle management of all weapon systems. The bridge across those two is Program Management Responsibility Transfer, PMRT. With Program Management Responsibility Transfer, money management and civilian and military positions transfer. So, you've got the Systems Command side of the house and the Logistics Command side of the house deciding how this is all 21 going to sort out, how we're going to merge these two commands together, where you don't have Program Management Responsibility Transfer anymore. Are we going to move responsibilities back and forth between these areas? The whole time I was at Sacramento as the commander, we fought a battle to not move workload from Sacramento to Boston, the Systems Command base up there. The underlying part of the whole thing, all the Systems Command principle bases were run by three-stars, and all the Logistics Command principle bases were run by two-stars. There was a push in the Air Force to reduce the number of general officers. The command, which after you meshed the command together, the first commander was the old Systems Command commander. All of those three-stars were his close confidants. He listened to them very seriously. So, you had this struggle. Are we going to move things within the command? Now you overlay the base closure on top of that. You say, “Well, what bases are susceptible to base closure?” You get a lot of internal politics going on. So, that made the story a little bit more complex because of internal politics within Air Force Materiel Command. You'll not get anybody officially to say that. Nobody. But that is well known. Anybody you talk to will know and understand that additional dynamic that made for a little bit more stress. That was always underlying things as we talked amongst the Air Logistics Centers. What we were trying to do with the Air Logistics Centers is identify Army, Navy, and Marine workload that should be moved to Air Force centers and take up the excess capacity. They did develop, in the future BRACs, a joint logistics 22 working group where they looked at that problem. But outside of base closure, that never really happened, they never made the decision to move this workload so that this installation could be closed, because the workload can be done somewhere else. It was always the installation should be closed, then where are we going to put the workload? You had interservice politics; the Army didn't want to give up any bases, the Air Force didn't want to give up any bases, the Navy didn't want to give up any bases. After the ‘93 round of base closure, the Depot at Navy North Island put some F-18 workload out for contract and Ogden Air Logistics Center won the contract. They moved that workload from San Diego to Hill Air Force Base to do the maintenance on the F-18s. I'm not going to make any accusations, but the supply system didn't work out well to support that operation, and so the workload went back after two or three years to Navy North Island. There was never any contract workload discussed by the services for any major systems after that. That issue amongst the services maintenance operations has died down pretty much now because base closure is sort of behind us. But all of that dynamic played in what was going on and some of it in the ‘93 round, some of it in the ‘95 round, much less in the 2005 round actually transpired. I've gotten off track again, I'm sure. AK: No, that's actually helpful. MP: I'm just trying to give you some background. AK: Yeah, that helps a lot, because most of my research has been through newspapers and so that helps to understand the story behind the reduction in 23 force that General Lyles had to do at that time because of the F-18. So yeah, thank you. MP: So, what did Hill/DDO’95 do after Hill Air Force Base didn't close? They changed the name to Utah Defense Alliance. Basically, after seeing the organizations in all of these other states where you had Air Logistics Centers, we determined this is something that's needed in Utah. The role of the Utah Defense Alliance is to maximize the economic potential of the military installations in northern Utah for the benefit of the population of the state and the businesses and communities surrounding the bases. It was a much broader view. It wasn't just a fight against base closure, it's how do we increase workload? How do we work with other organizations? How do we deal with the issues if the community's got a problem with the base, the base has got a problem with the community? How do we bring them together and act as a bridge to solve problems? How do we help people who are having trouble finding housing? How do our military members on the base integrate into the community? What can we do in the local educational institutions, primarily up at Weber State, to enhance the ability of people to work at the base? How can we find more engineers? Utah Defense Alliance tried to help evolve the whole operation of Enhanced Use Leasing and the position on the base where you now have commercial operations buildings. That all started moving through Utah Defense Alliance, and the Utah Defense Alliance basically spun off people into MIDA to run that operation, and even provided some funding for them. Much of what has 24 happened at Hill Air Force Base since the ‘95 round of base closure that has anything to do with the community, attracting new workload, or working any political issues with the Air Force has been done through the Utah Defense Alliance. Currently members of the UDA serve on the Civilian Task Force of the Chief of Staff of the USAF (Vickie McCall), and the Civilian Task Force of AFMC (Steve Rush). This provides insight into the AF and Command thinking on issues that may involve the Base and issues for the local community. The UDA provides the link for the State to interact with these organizations. We need to talk about DDO a little bit. I haven't spent a lot of time on DDO. DDO was an interesting situation. The Defense Logistics Agency was in the downsizing process just like everybody else. They had excess capacity. Everybody had excess. There was no question there was excess capacity, that was a given. Coming out of Vietnam and all the capacity that built up, and even all the bases that had been closed since the late 1960s, there was still excess capacity. We had more runways than we needed, we had more maintenance capabilities than we needed, we had more supply function than we needed. There was more than was necessary in the Department of Defense. DLA was no exception to that. The Defense Logistics Agency said, "We're going to close DDO," and they named several others. They didn't say, "We're going to do it through the base closure process," but what they did was, through a change of mission management process, the Defense Logistics Agency changed the way they were organized. By changing the way they were organized 25 and putting different functions in different locations, they generally made the mission at DDO no longer necessary. Well, what came to us as Hill/DDO'95 was that DDO was a target for base realignment and closure and needed defense. So, I met with the folks, and Hill/DDO'95 in general was interested in DDO, but there wasn't the same urgency as there was with Hill Air Force because it was a smaller operation and it was more Ogden-centric. Nobody in Salt Lake was going to get upset if DDO closed, nobody in Layton was going to get upset if DDO closed. It was very Ogdencentric. So, we worked with Ogden local government and myself and the folks out at DDO. The folks at DDO knew they were on the chopping block, so they provided specific data and information. We were able to build the case with the information that they provided that demonstrated that through DLA's own studies, which they contracted out to various think tanks, that the Defense Depot Ogden was the most efficient and most cost-effective operation in all of the DLA depots. It made absolutely no sense whatsoever to close a depot that was your most efficient, that had your best workforce, and it was all documented by DLA's own studies. I took all that information, I put that together in a briefing, I took it to DLA headquarters, I took it to the Base Closure Commission who came to DDO, and I made that case and the Base Closure folks sat up and took notice. The next thing I know, I got a notice from the contractor who had done the studies for DLA that they were going to sue me if I used their data in any further discussions or 26 conversations about the base and the base closure. Then the DLA folks came out here and met with us and talked with us. The deputy director of DLA at the time was a guy by the name of Larry Farrell. Larry Farrell, an Air Force Academy graduate a year behind me, had worked for me at Hill Air Force Base. He was the F-4, F-16 system program manager when I was the director of materiel management. So, we knew each other very well. He'd been the director of operations of the 388th Fighter Wing, and they moved him to the air logistics center to give him some careerbroadening experience in the logistics field. They asked me to give him a good position and he became the System Program Manager for the F-16, and he did a very good job at that. Well, he was now the deputy director in DLA. I believe he was a major general at the time. He might have been a brigadier general still, I don't remember. We had dinner at a restaurant up in Ogden with all the DLA folks who had been out talking to us, and out in the parking lot after the meeting—and this is after the presentations. We made the case for DDO pretty strong. He says "Mike, I need to tell you, you guys are doing a great job defending DDO, and DDO's a good base, there's no question about that. The people out here are good, but DLA is changing the way it's organizing and changing the way it's doing business, and DDO doesn't have a place in that new organization. We're consolidating on the coasts of the country and you're in Utah. You're not on one of the coasts. We've got one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, and one in the center of the United States. With today's transit systems, we no 27 longer need the ‘crossroads of the West,’” which is basically what DDO was known as because it was equal travel time to every major port on the West Coast by truck or train. He said, “You need to go ahead, you need to defend DDO, do whatever you need to do; do what you can with the community, but this base is going to close. It just is." He says, "Here's the way you need to look at this: If the base stayed open, it would be under DOD auspices. We would own the property, the community would have no use of the property, and the workload would get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. Much better to do it in one move where we close the installation under the BRAC process and provide opportunity for the local community to get the property and to then work a reuse operation that will enhance and grow as opposed to a shrinking workload over the next several years till it gets down to where it's no longer sustainable." He says, "I know you guys need to defend. I support you doing that. You need to go ahead and do that. I'm just telling you as a friend that it's for no avail because we've already made the decisions, and the higher ups have already agreed to the decisions, and we're using the base closure process to work it out. But we're done at Defense Depot Ogden by the time we get through the legal procedures we need to carry out in order to close the base." Well, we didn't tell any of the people at DDO that. I can see where people might say, "Well, you gave up DDO so that you could save Hill." There was none of that. That was never even considered by anybody as an option. We fought just as hard for both operations. In fact, since I felt like the people at DDO were really 28 getting the shaft, I probably fought harder for them than I did for Hill. I don't know what I would have done if those guys would have sued me, because they were a big, big operation and I was a really little guy. So, we made the case anyway. But that was the DDO side of the story. DDO ended up closing, and right now DDO has probably three times the jobs out there than it did. What's probably not known to a lot of people is under the construct that was put together. Andrea Lockwood, who was a city attorney, and myself coordinated a contract with the Boeing Company that, after the operations are taken care of, the profit that's made at BDO is split 50/50 between the Boyer Company and Ogden City. I think Ogden City is getting something like five to seven million dollars a year out of DDO operations. That just is a chunk of money that moves to them every year. It was really hard for the people who lost their jobs, but the other thing that a lot of people don't know is one of the principal missions at DDO was called the MASH operations, your mobile army hospitals. All of the mobile army hospital stuff was at Defense Depot Ogden. That was all moved to Hill Air Force Base, and there is now a DLA detachment here on Hill Air Force Base, which encompasses all of that MASH operations and several of the other management operations and things like that at DDO. So, everything didn't go away at DDO. Some moved to Hill Air Force Base. If you go down the road here, you see all of those stacked up containers on the side of the road, and that big new building out there; that's all DLA. It all used to be DDO, which moved over here. That was the 29 DDO side of the house. After BRAC ’95, Ogden City hired me to do the reuse of DDO, so I did that for the next eight years. That's just another part of the story. AK: So, once you had that conversation where you found out that defending DDO would come to no avail, did you change tactics on how you defended DDO? Or did you keep moving forward on your previous plans to defend DDO? MP: I kept forward. I'd already briefed the Base Closure Commission. I'd already presented all of the briefings that we were going to give that said “This is the most efficient base,” and it made DLA very, very uncomfortable because of the decision that they'd made already, because it left them open to criticism. You know, “Why are you closing your most efficient operation?” I don't know what DLA's answer was in that, but if you look at the history of DLA, you can find that on Google, you'll see that in the ‘90s they changed their organizational construct and all of that was part of this. They listed the ‘90s and the change of DLA's construct and how they were operating, and the bases that closed as part of that operation are all kind of documented there. It doesn't say, as part of the base closure and realignment process, we closed blah blah blah blah blah blah blah in order to fit this new organizational structure. So, it wasn't about efficiency, it was about change of management structure, which they were going to do anyway. If they hadn't used the base closure process, they would have just done it by whittling away and keeping a token force there, having the expense of keeping some amount of buildings open at DDO. It would eventually have gone away one way or the other. 30 But no, it didn't change our strategy. We still fought as hard as we could fight to keep it open and presented to everybody who wanted to listen to us. But we were mostly presenting to the Base Closure Commission, to the BRAC staff, to DLA, and to our congressional delegation to try and work with DLA. It was about, I think, three months or so before the final base closure process recommendations that I found out from Larry that that's what was going to happen. So, we'd done most of the defense already. I feel bad for the people out there because I'm sure there were several that lost jobs and had some economic difficulty in finding others. There wasn't an economic impact on the city or the local area because that came back really quickly. Within two years we were back to almost the same level of employment out there, and we used some of the people who had worked there before. It was a sad thing; I took it as a failure that we lost it. It wasn't a failure for Ogden ultimately, but it was a failure for the people that were working there and doing such a good job. They deserved better, I thought. AK: I've seen newspaper articles where the day that the BRAC commission came, people were lining the streets and there was all this big community support for keeping Hill open. Was community support a factor in the BRAC Commission's decisions at all? Or was it strictly a political process? MP: If they hadn't been there, it would have been a factor. The fact that they were there demonstrated that the community here was every bit as involved as any of the other best communities. According to Tim Ruppli - who helped us orchestrate all of that and said this is something that really needs to be done - Utah did it as 31 well as anybody. We orchestrated the route of travel so that they would go by Davis High School and all of the students at Davis High School were out on the road waving signs and things like that. Many people in Kaysville and the local community, and I think there were two or three other places where they were. I don't know if they came up the freeway and got off in Kaysville or if they went through Centerville, too, I don't know. We had a very, very good community turnout to demonstrate to them, and when they got up here at the briefing, they said, "Wow! You guys really ginned up the community!" "Oh no, no, no. They just know what's going on and they really, really want to be involved." So, yeah, I think it was important. I think if it hadn't have happened, it would have been a “box not ticked” sort of thing. I think it was very, very useful. There was no question about support for Hill Air Force Base, or DDO for that matter. We had the same sort of thing at DDO, it was just on a smaller scale. As they came into the depot, people were standing along 12th Street with these tshirts. In fact, I still have one. "Don't let the fat lady sing," you know. "We're not closing. We're not giving up." I mean, everybody on the base had those t-shirts on and people from all over the place. But a thousand, two thousand people there with these t-shirts on. It was really a sight to see. AK: [To Sarah] Do you have any questions? SL: Well, could we sort of move back to the beginning? I'd love to get on tape, the secret meeting in the basement of Dave Tanzy's house. 32 MP: Yeah, the secret meeting. That's Vicki's term, "secret meeting." The reason we call it secret is because Ron Yates, as the commander of Air Force Materiel Command, was really probably not supposed to be meeting with local community members. The press couldn't be there, so closed-door meeting kind of thing. It was billed as a social event and it was a social event. The meeting came about, Dave volunteered his house, we wanted to meet with General Yates to hear from him. We knew he was going to be out here and we said, “Can't you please come and spend some time with us?” We got the congressional delegation there and the governor there and I think we had kind of a dinner. I know there was food, so I'm assuming it was dinner, and we socialized and there were a good number of people there, both from the base and the local community. As the evening wore on, we moved down to a room in the basement where we basically had the Hill/DDO'95 folks and the congressional delegation and state folks and Ron Yates. There was nobody that I know of there from the base with him. I think his aide was upstairs, I don't think he was in the room with him. Jim Hansen kind of led the discussion, asking him what was going on here. He said, "Well, you know we've got excess capacity. You know we're under the gun. We've got to close some Air Logistics Centers, or we've at least got to go through the process.” I think we asked him the question, "Well, if Air Force Materiel Command is asked to nominate bases for closure, what will happen?" He said, "Well, I need to be frank with you. The least heat to Air Force Materiel Command would be for me to nominate McClellan and Hill." 33 I've already explained to you that reason for McClellan, because there was not near the community support or the political price to pay. Vic Fazio had moved on, or was in the process of moving on, he was retiring from Congress. Les Aspin was no longer the secretary of defense. It wasn't known then, but he was moving out. By this time, I think he was gone, and McClellan didn't have the same political clout. They viewed Ogden as kind of the nice little community out here that never really raised waves or caused any trouble or caused any commotion. He says, "Texas and Oak City and Georgia, they'll crucify us. You know, it's just terrible. Sam Nunn will take money away from us, I'm sure. So, I would not recommend any of those three, so that leaves me Hill and McClellan in Sacramento." Now, in the ‘93 round of base closure, Aerospace Metrology and Guidance Center did close, which was a very small Air Force Materiel Command Depot in Newark, Ohio. They thought that they were definitely untouchable because they did precision measuring equipment, and they had in their facility pilings driven way deep in the earth into bedrock. It was one of the only places in the country where this kind of bedrock existed that you could get into to have the kind of stabilized, earth-oriented platform that you needed for the calibration of this precision measuring equipment that was used all throughout the military. So, they basically thought they were untouchable, and they were small and they didn't have a whole lot of community support. They were kind of a little enclave stuck out on the outskirts of town. They closed them in ‘93. Easily. 34 So, Air Force Materiel Command had lost that base already and they went on to lose other bases besides McClellan and San Antonio. One of the reasons that they were able to close San Antonio is that they were able to retain the runway and give that to Lackland Air Force Base. Lackland and Kelly Air Force Base butt up one against the other, so they just moved the boundary of Lackland to include the runway and the runway operations. So, they were able to keep that runway operation and that Air Force base open, and then and they made that a detachment of Lackland, and then they just closed the Air Logistics Center in San Antonio. But in later years, Air Force Materiel Command had other bases. One base, the medical center where they do all the medical work and all the medical equipment, the city took over that base. They didn't close it, they just moved it from Air Force operations to local city operations, it was run by the city. So, a lot of things happened. The ‘93 round of base closure and the ‘95 round of base closure were pretty bloody. In 2005, there was a lot more finesse used and a lot more maneuvering used. They would take two bases and push them together into one base and keep both missions and things like that. But that meeting with General Yates, he was, "Just being above board with you, if they ask me for a recommendation, that's what my recommendation has to be. I'm sorry to tell you that. It's not because I don't like you and it's not because you folks don't do a good job out here. My job is to run Air Force Materiel Command in the best way that I can, and if I have to nominate two bases those are the bases I will nominate, because that's the least heat that it will 35 bring to the command." I don't think that surprised anybody. It stunned us, but I don't think it surprised anybody. It didn't surprise me. I knew Sacramento would be on there and I assumed that it would be Warner Robins or Ogden if you had to name two. As I said, Sam Nunn was still very much in power from Georgia. The other one had to be Ogden. They only had five, you know. What it told us is if we want to retain this base, it's going to be a fight. Now, Air Force Materiel Command did not have to nominate two bases. All five Air Logistics Centers were looked at. None were nominated. All five were allowed to be evaluated, and because all five were allowed to be evaluated, our case was better than San Antonio's or McClellan's. So, as it turned out, they were nominated for closure. Since Hill had not been closed, you can look at what has happened at the base since ‘95 with all of the workload that's moved here and then billions of dollars of contracts now for the strategic missile operations and things like that. If the base had been closed, that probably would have all been someplace else. So, if you look at the ramifications of Hill/DDO'95 on Hill Air Force Base in the future, I would say the existence of the Utah Defense Alliance and what it's been able to do over the last 20 years, however long it's been, and the work that's now here at Hill Air Force Base and the thriving job market and economic situation in this area. I think Hill/DDO'95 did a good job. AK: Just as a side note, do you remember around what date that dinner with General Yates was, just so we can put it into context? 36 MP: It had to be early on and was shortly after I came on board. I would say January of ‘93? Maybe. That time frame, probably after Christmas. Yeah, so probably January ‘93. AK: That's helpful, just for a timeline. I also wanted to know, in a newspaper article I was reading, it said that the Hill/DDO group had visited Washington in 1994, and what you had learned there, I guess, was discouraging and caused you to change tactics. Do you remember anything about that? MP: We visited Washington a lot, or I visited Washington a lot, and members of the group visited quite often. It could have been one of the meetings with the BRAC staff. It could have been the fact that we were touting move work from other military depots into the five Air Logistics Centers because the five Air Logistics Centers are the best depots of all the depots. They have the best infrastructure, they have the best workforce and more professional operations and more resources, more able to handle all of that workload in better locations with better community support. We may have heard from the BRAC then that they were not going to do any cross-servicing in this round of base closure. That if that was to come, it was to come in the future. So, we might have moved off of that strategy of, “The five Air Logistics Centers as the way you ought to go” and basically more focused on, “Here's why Hill Air Force Base is an installation that needs to be retained because of the cost-effectiveness of the operations and the cost to move the work.” 37 That was always a key question that the Base Closure Commission had to answer in the deliberations, was, “How much will it cost to move the work that has to continue to be done someplace else? How long will it take to amortize that cost so that the Department of Defense can start realizing savings?” When those numbers got to be five, six, seven, eight, nine years out that you don't amortize the cost—that was driven a lot by the ICBM work that was here—the argument for closing the base got harder and harder to make. So, the data started decision process to move in other directions. You still have the political nuances that you had to deal with, but it was hard to go against the data with political nuances when the data was not going to level. If it said, “Hey, it doesn't make any difference which one we closed, the amortization is going to be about the same plus or minus a year or two,” then we're going to do the one that is most politically explainable, as opposed to just cost. But if you've got a situation where we've been consistent, and the data we've gathered agrees with that, that the amortization of the cost savings from closing this base won't make, then it moves the base further down the line for consideration. So that's probably, in all likelihood what that referred to. But I'm guessing. AK: That makes sense. MP: I think one meeting back there, I met with the two colonels that were out at McClellan when I was out there, and they said, "We're closing McClellan. I don't care what they do or what they say, we're closing McClellan. That's happening. Ogden, we're not sure yet, but we're closing McClellan." That might have caused 38 us to say, “OK, we've got to fight really, really hard if they are going to close McClellan,” because they said when McClellan came off the ‘93 list, "We're going to get two next time. We'll get two.” They are the guys that are providing all the data and all of the amortization and all the information and all of the recommendations to the commission. The commissioners were all political animals. They were the foil to make the process look apolitical, but they were all political animals, and they were all on that commission for a specific reason. Somebody specific was in there. AK: Interesting. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up? MP: I could sit and talk to you here all day about this stuff. I'm glad I remembered Alicia's name. I’ve just got to remember her last name. AK: That's ok. This helps a ton. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This was awesome. MP: You bet. Vickie will have a lot to help you with those other things, too. She'll get mad at me for telling stories on her, I'm sure. But she was as much a driving force. I mean, everybody on the Hill/DDO'95 was useful, but Vickie and Jim Hansen were huge. 39