History
Groundbreaking for Reid-Hillview airport came in 1937. Bob and Cecil Reid first built the Garden City Airport in 1935, which was quickly closed to make room for U.S. Route 101. Their second site was northwest of the Hillview golf course, hence the name. Until 1946, the single runway at the airport was unpaved.
Reid-Hillview was a single runway airport until 1965, when a second runway was added. The control tower was added in October 1967.
The airport became the origin for an emergency supply airlift to the Watsonville Municipal Airport following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, after mountain and coastal roads were blocked, cutting off Santa Cruz and Watsonville from relief efforts by ground. The Watsonville Airport estimates that it received 100 tons of supplies via the airlift during the week following the quake. John McAvoy and Bill Dunn of the Reid-Hillview Airport Association received the 1990 Grand Award from the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission for organizing the airlift.
In 2010, San Jose State University's Aviation program relocated to Reid-Hillview. The University operates out of the Swift Building, where it holds classes during the academic year.
Read more about this topic: Reid-Hillview Airport
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“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)