[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 56 (Thursday, April 2, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E886-E887]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       IN HONOR OF HULET HORNBECK

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, April 2, 2009

  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Madam Speaker, I rise today to 
commend to my colleagues an article in the Martinez News Gazette, my 
hometown paper, that beautifully captures the wonderful contributions 
that Hulet Hornbeck has made to the environment and open space in our 
portion of the East Bay of San Francisco.
  The article is entitled, ``Life, Love and the Great Outdoors,'' dated 
February 28-March 1, 2009.
  I have known Hulet for many, many years and I have always admired him 
as a great leader and an avid defender of the environment. He 
understood many years ago just how important it is to protect open 
space for generations to come. He has been a leader in our community in 
acquiring lands for public use and creating magnificent recreational 
and open space opportunities for young and old alike.
  We owe a debt of gratitude to Hulet for his lifelong work and I am 
proud to be able to rise today to publicly thank Hulet for his vision 
and for his tireless efforts on behalf of our community.

        [From the Martinez News-Gazette, Feb. 28-March 1, 2009]

                   Life, Love and the Great Outdoors


 Hulet Hornbeck was instrumental in expanding East Bay Regional Parks, 
                 the largest park agency in the Nation

                            (By Greta Mart)

       At his serene, wooded home in Muir Oaks, Hulet Hornbeck 
     looks out at the horse pastures and wildflower-blanketed 
     hills and savors the sound of silence.
       ``It's the sound of wind, of birds, or simply the trees 
     rustling, I love it,'' Hornbeck said, standing on his wooden 
     deck that hugs his one-story house, in which comforting 
     silence permeates. Inside a fire burns quietly in a large 
     stone hearth; non-fiction books are stacked three feet high 
     and four feet deep on the grand piano, oriental rugs dot the 
     hardwood floor, and 50 years of treasures, travel mementos 
     and memories decorate the walls.
       In October he will turn 90. A lifetime of adventure, good 
     works and good luck has kept him spry, handsome and spirited. 
     He is one more Martinez resident--one you might see at the 
     store or on Main Street--who holds in his heart an 
     extraordinary character, and if you enjoy the plentiful open 
     space and parkland around the area, you would understand how 
     important his efforts are to you today.
       On Thursday he regaled this reporter with an abridged life 
     story.
       Born in New Jersey in 1919, Hornbeck spent his first decade 
     in Detroit, until his father abandoned the family at the 
     start of the Great Depression. His mother moved him and his 
     younger sister back to New Jersey to be closer to her two 
     sisters, who provided ``some degree of comfort,'' said 
     Hornbeck.
       There, in a suburb of Newark, he shared a bed with a cousin 
     and his sister went to a friend's house while his mother went 
     to work in a factory. During his teenage years, Hornbeck's 
     mother worked her way up the socioeconomic ladder, 
     segueing into sales and earning enough to move the family 
     into a four-story walkup in Bloomfield.
       ``I liked it, because we could finally live together, and I 
     got good exercise going up and down the stairs,'' said 
     Hornbeck. ``My mother was quite liberal with me, never 
     telling me that I couldn't do something. If I said I wanted 
     to sleep on the roof, she said okay, but tie a rope around 
     your ankle so you don't sleepwalk off.''


                Falling in love with the great outdoors

       He was befriended by a local Boy Scout troupe leader, and 
     soon was accompanying groups on camping trips in the Ramapo 
     Mountains. Hornbeck's mother and aunts liked to hike, and 
     with little money and no car, hiking was a frequent form of 
     entertaining excursions for the family. There was still a 
     great deal of open space and nature in New Jersey in the 
     1930s, said Hornbeck, before the freeways and 
     industrialization obliterated the landscape.
       When his mother purchased a used car, the family took its 
     first vacation, down to Cape May in the southern tip of New 
     Jersey. There they stayed in a boardinghouse, and Hornbeck, 
     at age 17, was so impressed with this new environment he 
     asked his mother if he could stay on there for the summer. 
     She told him to go to the hotel across the street and ask for 
     a job.
       ``I asked the guy if I could wash dishes, and he made me a 
     bus boy. At that time there weren't a lot of restaurants and 
     such, the hotel fed three meals a day to a lot of people, it 
     was a big dinning hall with the girl waitresses lined up 
     against one wall and the boys on the other,'' Hornbeck. 
     ``There was a separate smaller dinning room, where a big 
     family would sit for meals, curtained off from the main hall. 
     They had their own waitresses and bus boys. My boss told me 
     it was the Ambassador to Great Britain and his family.''
       The U.S. Ambassador to England at the time was Joseph 
     Kennedy and the children Hornbeck watched meal after meal 
     were Robert, Teddy, Rosemary and the four youngest siblings 
     of JFK. JFK wasn't there, as he was already in his 20s at 
     that point and was studying at Harvard.
       ``I remember saying to my coworkers, you watch, those kids 
     are going to be something else,'' said Hornbeck.
       A small inheritance from a Unitarian Universalist minister, 
     a suitor of his mother's, then sent Hornbeck to prep school 
     at the Newark Academy.
       ``He had asked my mother to marry him, but then he died, so 
     for $50 a month, I got a whole different viewpoint and 
     knowledge for two years,'' said Hornbeck. ``It opened my 
     eyes. After that I hitchhiked to Maine with a friend and we 
     slept in the woods. I got cleaned up in a gas station and 
     went to the registrar of the University of Maine and asked if 
     I could attend. He was impressed that we had come all that 
     way and he said, you're in, just like that.''
       His time in Maine was spent studying Forestry and 
     luxuriating in the great outdoors, spending school breaks in 
     the White Mountains of New Hampshire.


                              World War II

       But the looming clouds of war were gathering and Hornbeck, 
     after his sophomore year, told his friends and family there 
     would be a war in Europe, and he was going to join the 
     military.
       ``I told them I wanted to be trained by the time it 
     started, and that I wanted to fight in the air, not ground,'' 
     said Hornbeck. ``I joined the Army Air Corps, and was sent to 
     cadet school. They saw pretty quickly that I didn't have good 
     eye/hand coordination, and that I liked mathematics, so they 
     made me a navigator.''
       Pan American Airlines operated one of the few aerial 
     navigation schools at the time, in Coral Gables, Florida, and 
     Hornbeck studied there until November of 1941, when the Air 
     Corps shipped half of his class to Salt Lake City. There his 
     platoon was, introduced to the brand-new B 17 ``Flying 
     Fortress'' bombers they would soon be flying in the Pacific 
     Theater.
       On December 6, Hornbeck was at Hamilton Field in San 
     Francisco, ready to ship out to the Philippians, with a stop 
     in Honolulu, the next day.
       ``I was still in my blue cadet's uniform, and right before 
     take-off we heard, `you can't go,'' something has happened,'' 
     said Hornbeck. ``Well, we took off that night I steered us 
     all the way to Hawaii using the compass and drift meter, 
     getting a fix on the stars, and suddenly we were right off of 
     Diamond Head [on the island of Oahu].''
       Soon he was part of the famed Reconnaissance Squadrons that 
     plied the South Pacific for the next three years, serving as 
     the eyes of General McCarthy and Fleet Admiral Nimitz, and 
     using his navigation skills to locate the Japanese naval 
     fleet in the vast ocean waters.
       After the war Hornbeck returned to the States to earn a law 
     degree at Rutger's University courtesy of the G.I. Bill.
       ``While we were in the South Pacific, I asked a buddy, 
     where's a good Western town to go live when this is over. He 
     said Boise, Idaho,'' said Hornbeck. ``Sure enough, I got 
     myself to Boise and met Mary-Lynn.'' The two were married for 
     50 years until Mary-Lynn's death twelve years ago.


                           Moving to Martinez

       The pair first lived in New York City, and soon Hornbeck 
     requested a transfer to San Francisco. They rented a house in 
     Pleasant Hill, until Mary-Lynn found their home in Muir Oaks.
       ``She said, you don't even have to come look at it, it was 
     built for you,'' said Hornbeck.
       Mary-Lynn attended DVC, and then U.C. Berkeley, while 
     raising their two children, Jane and Lawrence, and teaching 
     fourth grade at John Muir Elementary for 20 years.
       ``It took her several years to get her degree, because she 
     only went to classes at night or on the weekends, she never 
     attended a full semester. When she was finally finished, she 
     said I'm too embarrassed to go get

[[Page E887]]

     my diploma, so I went to get it for her,'' said Hornbeck.
       Meanwhile, Hornbeck was working at a large insurance firm 
     in San Francisco, but it was ``not what I was cut out to 
     do,'' and on the side he had started a group of nature 
     enthusiasts called the Contra Costa Park Council.


                            Brush with death

       In 1965, a doctor's visit revealed melanoma tumor. The 
     doctor gave him five years to live and encouraged him to 
     start pursuing his dreams.
       ``I went to Bill Mott of the East Bay Regional Park 
     District, and said, I want to work for you,'' Hornbeck said. 
     ``Timing is so significant.''
       According to the East Bay Regional Parks District's history 
     section of its Web site, ``In 1962, William Penn Mott, Jr. 
     became the District's next General Manager. Mott's first 
     order of business at the Park District was to reorganize and 
     plan for the future. He brought new life to every aspect of 
     the District's operation by restructuring, and bringing in 
     talented professionals like Richard Trudeau, Chief of Public 
     Information and Hulet Hornbeck, Chief of Land Acquisition who 
     both would serve as leaders in the park and trail movement 
     during the next 40-years. Mott's enthusiastic vision of a 
     grand system of hilltop and shoreline parks would require 
     additional stable funding, and he moved quickly to increase 
     District revenues. The Forward 1964-1969 Plan was developed 
     by Mott and his staff in 1963 to identify the Park projects 
     that were needed to serve all East Bay residents, even those 
     outside of the District's boundary. In 1962, residents in 
     Contra Costa County had turned down a funding measure for 
     county parks; so park supporters began pushing for annexation 
     to the Regional Park District. In 1964, voters in West and 
     Central Contra Costa County approved annexation to the 
     District, and Kennedy Grove and Briones were soon developed 
     and opened as the first Regional Parks entirely within Contra 
     Costa County.''
       Hornbeck said the District didn't have a single square acre 
     of parkland when he started, but by the time he retired in 
     1985, 64,000 acres were purchased and incorporated into the 
     park system, including much of Briones and the Franklin 
     Hills.
       ``Now it's over 100,000 acres, and thanks to the recent 
     passage of Measure WW, it will keep growing. As a special 
     district, we had the power of eminent domain, but we never 
     used it as a threat, and we always paid fair market value,'' 
     said Hornbeck. ``We had the support of all the key developers 
     in the area, who knew the value of balancing people with open 
     space, and we always worked with justice and integrity. The 
     public supported us.''
       Hornbeck said Senator John Nejedly was instrumental in 
     securing legislation that expanded the District's ability to 
     create a trail system.
       The Hulet Hornbeck trail in the Carquinez Strait Regional 
     Shoreline was dedicated in 2005.
       ``Hulet is credited with overseeing the acquisition of 
     49,000 acres of parkland, expanding the District's land 
     holdings from eight parks (13,000 acres) to 46 parks (62,000 
     acres) thus securing the unique position that the East Bay 
     Regional Park District still enjoys today as being the 
     largest regional park agency in the nation,'' according to 
     the nonprofit American Trails organization.

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