The San Diego/Vladivostok Space-Bridge
As Chair of the International Affairs Board I started representing Mayor O'Connor in various official capacities either with delegations that came into San Diego or were going abroad. After 1986, I was in China for five or six weeks, and then later I went to Japan to a worldwide mayors conference. I also went with the first official delegation to Vladivostok. San Diego signed a Sister City Agreement with Vladivostok in September of 1991. That was just after the demise of the Soviet Union. Vladivostok was still closed to foreigners. During the whole Soviet period Vladivostok was one of the secret cities. They had several of them across their huge country. Even people from other parts of the Soviet Union couldn't come into Vladivostok. In January of 1992 they opened the city to foreigners for the first time.
I was part of a group of people here is San Diego, of the Vladivostok Sister City group, that produced a space-bridge between San Diego and Vladivostok. It's not unusual at this time, but it was very unusual then! We had live telecasts going on between San Diego and Vladivostok. Sea World donated a facility and then we got television companies to donate satellite dishes. It was a very involved thing. They did the same thing. We sent technicians to Vladivostok. How we ever managed the whole thing and raising the money to do it was astonishing, because we did it in a very short matter of time!
We won an award from the National Organization in Washington for that program. We got specialists from UCSD to help us. It was an amazing experience. It was all done in a few months. The impetus was a man who was per of their delegation that came over here who wanted this to happen. He was so persistent that we took up the mantel and ran with it. When I think back on it now I am continually amazed, because I'm involved with planning now, and know it was fairly impossible to do what we did in only two or three months. It was just phenomenal.
