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Flashbacks: 'Tell the Nation the Truth'
Before Touchstone Energy® Cooperatives, which turned 20 this year, there was “Tell the Nation the Truth,” a national advertising program run by NRECA that was better known by its explosive nickname...
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Flashbacks: Taming the Last 'Power Desert'
Nevada high desert with Ruth Ely Mountains. (Photo courtesy Getty Images/Gunter_Nezhoda) Those lonesome, sun-seared expanses of the West that are so inviting to today’s solar developers were once known...
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Wild Co-op Country
A grainy image from the summer of 1985 shows article author Mark Glaess (center) with Oregon statewide colleague Sara Baker-Sifford (center-right) and Wasco EC board member Jean McKinney (center-left)...
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Flashbacks: No Kidding. You've got Lights!
Farmers’ Electric Cooperative headquarters. (Photo courtesy Farmers’ Electric) Most electric co-ops have preserved an anecdote or two about their early years. Farmers’ Electric Cooperative’s (FEC) best...
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Flashbacks: 'They Called Me a Communist'
Mansfield Dam (Photo courtesy Ellison Photo Co.) Future President Lyndon B. Johnson’s top priority as a freshman member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1937 was getting $5 million from...
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Flashbacks: 'Full Partners in the 20th Century'
Montana’s Yaak River Valley. (Photo by David M. Carson) At precisely 3:00 in the afternoon on Oct. 10, 1963, lightbulbs blinked on in Montana’s Yaak River Valley. Belatedly, central-station...
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The Story of Mod 1
The Mod 1 turbine. (Photo courtesy Natasha Thompson) In the mid-1970s, President Jimmy Carter was making a big push for “alternative” energy sources that could lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil....
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The Small-Hydro Rush of 1978: Battling the 'Power Pirates'
(Photo courtesy iStock/Getty) Most people know about the two big 19th century gold rushes: the one in California in 1849 and the one in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1896. Some people have also heard of...
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Flashbacks: Electricity Comes to a North Dakota Farm
An entry in Pauline Olson’s diary. (Editor’s note: All quotes from Pauline Olson are transcribed as she wrote them.) Telephone. Electricity. Television. Pauline Olson (1885–1969) saw each of these...
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Flashbacks: Figuring Out 'The Angle'
(Courtesy NRECA) The area-coverage principle—the idea that electric co-ops, as democratic, not-for-profit businesses, should not limit their service to places where it’s easy to get a positive return...
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'By the People For the People'
A scene from “By The People, For The People,” NRECA’s first movie about the formation of co-ops. Residents erect a pole to start the electrification process. (Photo courtesy NRECA) Scott Moore was...
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Saving Co-op History
Lauren Meschter, a colorist at Henninger Media Services, works to digitally restore “By the People, For the People” at their studio in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo by Dennis Gainer) Old films can be...
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Flashbacks: Rural America Enters the Computer Age
(Photo courtesy NRECA) Looking back all these years later, a headline in the May 1983 issue of RE Magazine seems quaint: “Computing in the Country.” Two other things that jump out are a photo of a...
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Flashbacks: The First Wind-Power Boom
(Photo courtesy Windcharger) We’re in the middle of a wind-power boom. Installed capacity has increased from just over 4,000 MW in 2001 to close to 70,000 MW today. This happened once before in the...
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Flashbacks: The Kids Who Electrified Highwood, Montana
Distribution lines in Sun River Electric Cooperative service territory. (Photo courtesy, Sun River Electric) It started with 13 eighth-graders brainstorming in a rural Montana school and culminated...
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Flashbacks: The Legendary Wit of J.C. Brown
J.C. Brown with staff in the 1980s. (Photo courtesy NRECA) Every organization has its colorful characters, men and women who are still talked about years after they have retired. NRECA’s J.C. Brown,...
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Flashbacks: Rural Electrification By the Numbers
A 1921 cartogram based on access to central station power. (Photo courtesy General Electric) A cartogram is a map based on something other than land area and distance. A cartogram based on gross...
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