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Utah Legislators Learn About Falcon Hill

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Falcon Hill Ground Breaking

Falcon Hill October Groundbreaking. Photo credit: James Arrowood.


I work at Hill Air Force Base so I was interested to read about a presentation made to the Utah Legislature recently concerning Falcon Hill. This involves the construction of the largest Enhanced Use Lease project in the history of the Department of the Air Force. It officially began October 10, 2008 with a ground breaking ceremony held at the Hill Aerospace Museum.

I follow the blog of Becky Edwards, the incoming representative for Utah House District 20. She uses her site as a way to be communicative and accessible to her constituents. A recent post stated:

There was a great presentation to the legislators from Davis, Weber, and Cache counties from Falcon Hill, the National Aerospace Research Park at Hill Air Force Base. This is an exciting project with a tremendous economic growth potential for northern Davis County. In a nutshell it is an office park and high-technology research site, which will include hotel, restaurant and retail space. This project is estimated to eventually bring around 15,000 jobs to Davis County. An example of the type of job creation is the new Combat Search and Rescue (CSARX) program that will mean 1,250 military jobs with 6,250 additional supporting jobs for the mission, with a timeframe of 2013. The average salary of the supporting jobs for this project is $100K, an income 75% above the current state average. This really is an exciting one of a kind public-private collaborative effort that will benefit our area for years to come.

Falcon Hill National Aerospace Research Park is one of the first Enhanced Use Lease projects to reach the development phase.
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Veterans Day: Remembering a Korean War Veteran

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Guns In Korea

Guns In Korea


On this Veteran’s Day my guest writer is my father-in-law, Robert Holst. This is his story of his service during the Korean War.
Robert aboard the A. E. Andersen bound for Korea.

National Guard

I joined the National Guard for three years. I was in it awhile before I graduated in 1949. We used to have fun at summer camps. We’d go down there for two weeks and drive a big truck. I drove a big six-wheel drive truck into Salt Lake once. One day I went with a friend to Ogden to join the Army. A newspaper boy came by and said that the 204th had been called into active duty. We went back to Brigham and reported to the armory where doctors came and gave us a physical. Every day we reported to the Armory to train and get our equipment ready to be sent to Fort Lewis. Each day we marched down to the Hower Hotel to eat.

Fort Lewis

When it was time to go we got on a train that took us to Fort Lewis. I was there about one month while we trained and I got my GI driver’s license. Then they sent me on a train to mechanics school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. There I passed a test so they put me in a Master Sergeant class where I was the only Private First Class they had ever had. When I was done I went home for a visit and my Mom, Dad and Janet took me to Fort Lewis. There we got our equipment ready to be sent overseas.

Pusan and Inchon

At night we boarded the A. E. Andersen and by the next morning we were in rough seas and were all sick.  When we got to Pusan we trained and waited for our equipment and then trained for another month. They loaded us and all our equipment on a ship and took us to Inchon. There we drove our equipment across a pontoon bridge into Seoul. From there we crossed the 38th parallel. I was put on guard duty on an outpost above a Korean cemetery. There was a place that was dug out and it was pitch, pitch black, no moon out. They put three of us up there and we didn’t know what to expect. All three of us sat there and stared all night wondering what the crud was going to happen, scared to death. That was the first night I was up on the front.

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My Work at the Department of Defense

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Terrorizing drug runners in the Caribbean.
I don’t normally write about my work but on finding some old rickety photographs over the week-end I thought you would be interested in the stories behind them. Back in 1995 drug runners were getting the upper hand. They even had navigational charts with the current locations of United States Navy and Coast Guard patrol boats. The Department of Defense decided a new approach was needed. A secret program to inject a little terror into the drug runners and disrupt their operations was begun. I was chosen to lead the program because as a federal civilian employee with a lot of “use or lose” annual leave it would just be assumed that I was on vacation if I was not at my desk.

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