2. I am particularly delighted to be here tonight, for I was born in Ogden. Even among members of my family that event is less significant than the fact that The Utah Construction Company also had its beginnings in Ogden some 14 years earlier. The company was started in January 1900 with $24,000 in capital and it prospered from the outset. It became the west's leading railroad builder and as early as 1919 it reported an annual profit of $1,600,000. Its early shareholders were pioneer Ogden families whose names are known to you -Eccles, Dee, Wattis, Browning, Pingree, Christensen, Scowcroft, and others. The descendants of these families for the most part are still the major shareholders of the company today and in the end they have been well rewarded for their patience. Their patience was sorely tried during the middle years of the company's existence. The $1,600,000 profit figure earned in 1919 was a record that was not seriously challenged for the next 26 years. By 1920 the railroads were largely built, and the company management was slow to reemploy its skills and its assets profitably in other directions. While it rarely lost money, its results were something less than spectacular from 1919 until 1946. During these years it doggedly pursued heavy engineering construction as its main activity and the name of Utah Construction Company was associated with many of the landmark construction activities that characterized the western landscape - great dams like Hoover, Grand Coulee, Davis and Bonnie; the Columbia-Geneva steel plant at Provo; tunnels; vast earth-moving projects here and abroad; ship-building and military installations; and large industrial plants. All this produced average profits of around one-half million dollars a year. So discouraged were the shareholders with the prospects for