By S.G. Patton

Craig Spohn, executive director of Cyber Innovation Center, grew up in Bossier City. The son of a non-commissioned officer who was assigned to Barksdale Air Force Base, Spohn spent his formative years in northwest Louisiana.

His education consists of a daisy chain from one Bossier Parish public school to another: Bellaire, Curtis and Elm Grove, graduating in 1979 from Parkway. Growing up near and around Barksdale AFB in Pecan Park subdivision, Spohn spent many afternoons riding his bike near the base’s east reservation and camping at Flag Lake with siblings. Pecan Park bordered the Barksdale property line. It was on a dirt road in a pecan orchard owned by the old Fullilove plantation. He hooked up oil and gas wells through college while studying finance at LSUS. Once he graduated, there was little in the way of work. “It was all a part of the brain drain we experienced as a state in the 1980s,” Spohn said.

Now, that property near Pecan Park where Spohn grew up is highly developed, and Bossier City, along with the rest of northwest Louisiana, has embarked on a path that will make this region as synonymous with the word “cyber” as Silicon Valley is with the microchip or Washington, D.C. is with politics.

The center of this activity will lie very near the spot where Spohn spent his boyhood. If Louisiana experienced a “brain drain” in the past, the tub appears to be refilling, and enthusiasm is an understatement for what Spohn exudes when discussing the newly zoned Research Triangle Park, home to the Cyber Innovation Command Center. He is eager to set the record straight.