experienced that is from this position of having general faith in politics, faith in government faith in the state through suspicion and fear, to embracing other apparently marnalized cultures in the state. right. that is the experience, not simply, i tof ufo believers from the mid-20th century through the late 20th century, but of many americans. i mean, that period as well as we we came out of the betty and marty hill era with a mass kind national suspicion and fear, conspiratorial belief and so on and so forth. and that's their in miniature, too. well, thank you for that excellent summary and. all i can say is, as a writer, you've set yourself up to do an interesting sequel. this further investigation into this c let's all give a warm round of applause tothewjoe holley is a e

winning journalist and author he worked for the houston where we were colleagues. were you at the light at one point? yeah, we were the quality that san antonio es tt was the slogan on the magic. yeah. we remember the day the light went out and it's written a number of books ranging from baseball to, sadly, sutherland's springs. i also want to tell you he he wrote editorials for the chronicle one of the pulitzers he won was for that the editorial page editor at point at one point was jeff, who had been the total editor. d d about joe that

you could give him any topic to within a few hours you'd have a very nice piece. did he ever tell you that he. did not tell me that but. well, joe, i think you'd like to start off with a brief reading to kind of set things up for sure. thank you, rick. thank you all for coming. as rick suggested, i've lived in san antonio twice during my long life, but i have known san antonio since before i was born. my mother is from a little town called below san antonio so we would go down there through san antonio from waco where i grew up. and so i always thought i like come to san antonio and i like to sort of seek out the icons of this, this great city, you know, the alamo, zillow's delicata and rick casey, you and i have kwn other about 40 years or so. yeah. something that in any old house i do about that but

anyway also ass mentioned, i have been an editorial long time and still write editorials for houston chronicle and as you if you a about editorial writers, you know that we instant experts on anything and everything and then forget it the next day. and i tell you that partly because want you to realize that the book power is more about a grassroots movement among rural texans than it is about policy sething of that. like in texas.aph or so of in 1885. and this is july 4th, 1885, in austin, where there's a huge

independence day celebration. that's partly independence day celebrating and partly celebrating the opening of the driscoll hotel on congress the the austin daily statesman reported between 4006 thousand austinites gathered for e driscoll ceremony beneath a string of ianscent lights on beacon street. now sixth street. they listen to brass baa string band speeches by driscoll himself, by the austin mayor and other dignitaries, an reporter noted that the ceremony was illuminated. remember this is 1885 illuminated not only by ectric lights, but by and this is a quote the the beauty of austin includin the of the city 1885.

you'll as long as the reporter started in by calling attention to the young ladies he wrote he cannot close this report without saying point blank that if all the young and ladies last evening reside austin, the city will its boasted reputation of havinge pretty ladies and ugly. than any city on the american continent. anyway, this thousands ugly men and otherwise listen to a keynote address by a prominent us and lawyer and land agent named edward w shands. he was an indiana native. he'd moved in the 1850s and he invited his audience to imagine austinites at the same downtown

anyearinto the hazy, d july 2000 a year or 2000, the he said, would be the raising or raising of the by then venerable old hotel chan'sre a quarter of a million people would be living in their fair city in the year 2000. he forebears the austinites of 1885 and shaking their heads and how those earlier austinites would respond to their city at the dawn the 21st century. what would be their amazemen if they could only witness the wonders which have been accomplished since electricity has beenv= caught, and in a measure changed.

and then he imagines what some of what what might be happening in the year 2000 elect trickle airship would be ferrying from austin san francisco from thence to china and japan returning over asia and europe and across atlantic to home again making a pleasure trip around the globe in a few days. electricity would be used send shock through people, causing them to live longer and in all diseases. americans of the future would be saved not f disease thanks to electricity, but also from foreign invaders. he predicted entire armies and navies that dared to attack america would be instant,

painlessly destroyed with electrical bt. every day. 60,000 copies of the austin daily would be delivered through pneumatic tubes to every building in austin. the postal service would be delivering newspaper to home electrical and airships would drop the papers upon, theould breakfast tables of subscribesis from austin so that was mr. shands. mr. shands imagination running, i suppose. but. but now think about. the 20th century deep into the 20th century. and they are millionexans and

many more millions of americans who in■ the 19th thirties. not only that, don't pneumatic tubes delivering their newspaper. they don't even have an electric light bulb in t because electricity has not made it by the 1930s into rural america. so about how that changed. let's talk about why that was because the cities by this time have been electrified. there are certainly parts of san antonio that still had outhouses and, you know, didn't have much electricity. but most of the cities around texas were white. first of all, what was it like, people on the farm? yeah, well, about that, edison had done his magic just a few years before this fellow was speaking in austin. so austin san antonio, el paso,

galveston that the state's largest city all electricity. if you lived in town, you're your home. know the major hotel businesses along houston street, th would all be lit up with electricity. if you live outside of town, if ved where my mother did in big foot, you didn't have electricity. er ran the general store in big footo the 1930s and beyond. i'm thinking she she still had to rely on on coal. oil lamps and that was because the investor utilities that supplied energy to the cities of this state could saw no reason so no reason to energize the countryside. there weren't enough people. it cost too much and they just didn't want to do it. and they would not do it because they would have to run a wire which might cost, i think,

$5,000 a mile. and was just not enough people along the right, 200 people in bigfoot, all scattered out except right there in that one little block where my grandmother had her and it just didn't make financial sense. well, how did that affect the of grandmother and your grandfather, their daily life? you know, it's fortunatelre mti. but you've done your research. done research. and also, you know, my grandfather on the other side was the other side of the family. a farmer in central texas near hillsboro. and whitney. and that reminds me that brothers and i were growing up and we would go visit him. my mother would always say, go to the bathroom before we get up there, because, you know, he's gn and and he he did have electricity by then, but into forties, i think he was still relying on a hand, you know.

well, you had had to get the wa relying on coal lamps and you know kids would have to do their homework at night with the flickering light of these lamps. women, the hill country. as rt writes in the lbj biography, you know, they they were having to use what caro robert caro sad irons because these heavy blocks of iron that you're to to iron a wrinkle sure that you have washed hand outside in a in a wood fired tub and so life hard a about how you would see in the hill countryho guessed you would guess they were in their sixties. they w thirties because of the hard lives they lived in. thr sbands were the same way. now what what kind of i'm sure of these farmers tried to be able to solve thatblem

and what did they try to do and what was the result. imagine. well my grandfather in co oyourn living in the small town or the country in the 1930s, living the life that i just described. and so they decide maybe on a saturday to go into town a have a meeting with the power provider or the electric company you know, i can imagine them, you know, i can imagine the wivesni shirt for their husband and maybe they put est ir of khakis and their straw hat. and in a, you know, maybe a cont of them goes into town and says, we need electricity. and the executive talking to will shake his head and. he would say, well, we're not in

the charity business. we're in the business to make money and we're sorry. but if want electricity, move intoown, either that or pay 5000. yeah, yeah, exactly. get a loan ourutf house. so just put in perspective, too, we're talking about more aligh. we're talking about farmers who once got electricity, no longer had to milk their cows by hand. and a lot of that, i think, didn't realize that because when fdr and the new deal constructed way for them to get electricity, there were some of them, maybe asking power for ruralot go texas, where some of them were apprehensive because they didn't they didn't really seeeepurpose. other than that light bulb that hu from the ceiling in the living roomer

companies would tell that is that you all you all won't have enough reason to have electricity. you just let it go. we'll get to that in a minute. i want to explore that a little bit more. the problem, of course was not just in san antonio. i know one of the statistics fromok w that in 1935, more than 6 million of the nation's. 6.8 million farm families were es and sam rayburn out that collin county that's where r distinguished attorney general hails. it'no very much a suburban area, but in those days they had 6089 farms in collin county outside of dallas, and 83 had eltric. but it was even more that because the companies were they were not local, you know, mom and p electric

they were they had been almost monopolized if i recall, one one man company owned about 25% of the utilities around the country. and when you me fdr, these people needed help they weilt it, but they needed leadership. in js fit term, fdr asked a certain texan to s a bill that would start address the problem. let's talk that or. are we talking about sam or are we talking the young guy o i co? sam rayburneah. rayburn. sam rayburn and those of you who age, perhaps, or maybe you studied sam intexat you remember that how looked? i k ked the same from age 35 until he died. you know, thisat

guy with a totally head permanent scowl, and yet he was seri yes, he was earnest and he was absolutely dedicated in a post to use government for the people's fit rticularly for those rural texans he represented that that rick mentioned. and he would tell people, you know, you all probably and sists using a and you h' seen their red their red hands from day after day doing like that. and so he was to finding a way to get power literally and symbolically to rural texans and in fdr he found a a willing ally,íd a it by the way, he did more than fdr was more interested in than helping out

in the rural because these trust were rapacious towards the city people too in terms of the profiteering they would do the they it's a natural of so he know broke up the trust and one of the things they did thisoo joe's book but one of the things they did was ty d cies the opportunity to buy their local utilities. one of those that did that was san antonio and i won't go into that much to our benefit in san antonio now has the utility in d it's a your property taxes would be considerably er if it if it weren't for that because they've been able to offer among lowest rates while giving 16% of your bill to the city for the general fund and hold down the so that's just one other side

benefit of what fdr did to take on these trusts. so that that was an unpaid endorsement ray of kpbs. that's true. yeah. yeah, i, i mean, i do get my electricity free doing that kind of thing. i hadstructure. lbj like sam rayburn also had seen those men and women in th l country in the 1920s, 1930s. as like fredericksburg today obviously are, or kerrville oh city. i mean, these were i these were backwoods communities cut from the rest of the state and most of them, except unless you lived

or of the towns, you did not have electricity. and johnson had seen those people. these were his relatives who had had to work the way. sam rayburn's mother and sisters had had to work. and bece when when he got to congress as aungn was, i'll get it for you. was hard, partly because a lot of a lot ofse rural hill country texans were suspicious not only of government, but of electricity itself. they weren't sure what it did if. you pull that switch with the house up with it, catch on fire whatever so. so some of them weren't particularly eager to get it. what was the structure of what the bill, the rural electrification act of 1935, 1935. and i suppose model could have been for fdr with new deal to create or found anat

would come in to a rural area b. but he and his advisers decided there was a better way. and so the rcaing institution sf you are living in the outskirts of fredericksburg or wherever, you know west of sanonio, if you can persuade enough of your ighbors to spend $5, then you can take that. you can take that money,washgtot was up a power for for your. and this was a loan so that people actually over a long period of time of like we're paying for the outrageous fees during storm uri here that that

the gas generators got paying for that over a very long period of time. so they were able to actually this not a burden on the taxpayer not a burden on the taxpayer. and they were 2% loans by law. that's and the money would be to set up a powernt and you had to have a certain number of o nn doing that they ho certain income. it was it was modest but you also had to what theop let me back up little bit the arrangement was a cooperative me democratically owned not for profit and enough people to keep a power plant going. and they would elect a board. they would elect their. but before you got that, you had to have something that the rca ended up calling. you had to ha person known as a ramrod, somebody would

travel around the the potential co-op area and find enough with the $5 and with the interest inu you could get the loan. so you know those sports term y is a goat. i do it means greatest of all times who was the goat of the ramrod. there were several one that i find really interesting is the woman named mabel douglas douglas with two s's on the end, mal and her husband. and suddenly i can't remember his first name lived way over in east texas, close to not that but atlanta, texas, almost in louisiana. almost in arkansas. her husband ran an auction barn called po'boys pony.

you like the and he would auction off anything. he auctioned off abut mainly car barn. she became the woman. be ramrod for that area, east texas. an she drive this is the 1930s she would drive model t all over piney woods looking for people, persuading people that an electric co-op was in their best interest. sometimes they didn't have the money, and ssh to help find the $5 for it for a ■>membership in the co-op. i can talk, i can go on record.. tell us about her, her later political career mabel douglas during the time that she was helping her her husband run the auction, she also had had a restaurant or cafe there near the auction barn called the

dewdrop, of course, dropping, i think she had a little hotel boardinghouse. she was on the school board. she did everything for the little town over there, douglasville. and then became mayor. i think she became mayor the 1950s and kept getting reelected. finally, at the age of 85, she said i'm retiring. i'm not going to be mayor anymore. and so there was an election she wasn't on the ballot, but the riding vote elected again. so mabel douglas ran or served as mayor more tour. and then she said, i am quitting. this is it. but she would she was you know, she was a ramrod for electric co-op because she said, you know, this is good for us in this part of east texas. this is going entirely too fast. go tk a number of stories of heroic people and how

people got together. one of the things the one one chapter i think is particularly interesting, frankly, i made most of my living writ about the people that there pr agents didn't want me writing about. and we had a case that with personalities of one of the big rm to go through quickly because actually it have a happy ending but tell us abo e personalities i we have a place near bande a there is a co-op. i get every year a list of people to vote for. i have no idea who they are. s's that's one kind of issue that you don't get t thato have personalities was a great case of. so my wife laura tells her that sometimes i go too far around to get back to the point but i'm going to i'm going to head in one direction, rick.

and i will come back. okay. i hope so. so when i was a kid up in waco and coming down just to to bigfoot, we we pass through these littlen think it was highway 81 back then, not i-35, georgetown, round rock salado. georgetown and round rock. the population, one or both those towns might have been five or 600, and there was a stone quarry off to the west. and so those were dusty little texas and now, of course, you ose towns are like. and so personally elic what wasp johnson they go on over not sure how far maybe they go to junction i'm not sure. it's a pretty good size area and in beginnings and they were among the first because of lbj centers of coue, they were a typical rural co-op and the

problems had in the 1950s is that they're, you know, people were leaving in the 1940s and fifties. people were leaving texas and moving to san antonio, dallas and austin. now, course, they're you know, those towns are among fastest growing in the country. personally use that little rural co-op from. the 1930s is the largest co-op in the country in the united states. and there their membership is growing. obviously by leaps and bounds. so sometime in the 1970s,e cohort cohorts, i guess is the best word of took over personality co-od able make the board self perpetuating they were able to pay themselves way more money than most co-op managers general

manager was making. $800 something like that. yeah. yeah and the average was about 120 at that. yeah exactly. but, but they, they totally forgot that this a member owned not for profit organization finally some of the members began toueion o are these guys and why are they doing what they doing, are they make why are we paying them all this much money they can't contacte n they got in touch with several week newspapers out in the hill country and began to expose some of the shenanigans and they got it stopped and but this went on for decades. you know, i want to say for a year. yeah, long time now per analysis. one of the best run one of the

most progressive co-ops in the country, thanks to the members for the mostared to take upon themselves to make change and. this is up around johnson city. johnson is the headquarters. goes on on out to the hill country. oh yeah. okay. you know, i wouldn't want t youe what they call ious in the investor owned utilities just lay down when when this was the rda talk about some of the ways they tried to fight it. well the ious certainly lobbyists that they that they funded in washington and in state capitals they also they had an interesting technique in the early days of the co-ops where build what came to be called spike lines. in other words, if they heard the rumor that these farmers, ranchers were organizing an co-op, they would go out and knock on theybe meone

like mabel douglass or or potential members and they'dy,or you, you know, for andn that neighbor back over there, for some of you. but they would they would offer to build electric lines for enough of those co-op members that it would wreck co-op. the co-op wouldn't have enough memberso and most of the i remember one farmer talking about how one of those guys came to his door and said, you know, will will buy you a new your wife your wife will buy a new refrigerator, a new so if you'll sign up with us with this new line that we're building. and he said to hell you, i'm a member of the co-op they depend on me. and he slammed the door and that's that's great. i'm going. 45 minutes goes very, very fast. when i have time for some questions. i just do want to quote on the

you mentioned the lobby was sam sam rayburn who. yeah he had a great great bit of poetry. and he said it was the toughest meanest group of lobbyists in the history of the country was basically what he said. get find it. now in my notes. but it was, you kno he felt strongly about it. it'sf u don't write questions. we got i've got plenty more but if you do there are two wonderful young women with sir yeah. anybody. what what happened with the electrification and rollout for both african-american and the beuse i would imagine that

they were on the bottom end of the totem polent came to bringing electricity in its that in east texas, for example there were a number of african-american farmersthey the cop.but as some of them told mei talking to a fello saugustine se knew that's where we got our electricity, but we weren't really part the movement. and that's an important point because in the thirties, in the fortient the the electric co-op was an actual grassroots movement. people believed in it. i suspect that the people living the personalized territory these days, you know they know that's where they get their electricity. but it's not the same kind of thing. and my impression is that the

electric co-ops had a hard time incorporating their african american members into movement. it was a little better in south texas with hispanic members of the co-op, but it has been for way too many years. you know, a more anglo of thing. i think you're on to something. when i was at st mary's university in the a summer intern at the light. when i came, somebody pointed me to six block area 2.3 miles americas where people were still d outhouses and we had colonias on the western part just outside of city limits, where people had to buy water off of unpaved. and they also had outhouses. so and it's not ancient history that those people and that's i

think about rick. i mean, rick and i are venerable all but you know, it wasn't long ago that things like that were here in san antonio. it's only to generations back in my family were families did not have electricity. you so it was a long time ago but still two generations. yeah these systems are. how were they? how were the generators? was bee nuclear and this was before it i mean have a lot a train coming back and forth we're supplied by coal here but what was the source turned the generatorsogee whole country. you know, i'm not sure. i don't think it was kolb, but i'm not sure what it would have been. what are some other and would. i don't know. yeah, i don't. do you know i wanted to say water but that sounded too. i don't know. well, for some t whole sierra, that part of that's water. yeah of course. yeah.

yeah. no, i was curious as to what what would p generators. and now back to they're looking at that's, right. yeah. yeah. i mean and when rick lcr i that i think that's that's true. yeah. yeahany her questions. yes i'm notll informed i am on all this but shoue tes grid join the grid. a whole area and my answer would yes but i'm. no, no all i know is that el paso which is not part of the texas grid didn't the problems we had during the you know i that i was an editorial writer an instant so if i had to write that editorial. yes. yes. in the back. yeah.

um folks in lubbock have had their municipal utility recently privatized. often oftentimes don't talk about, you know, moving from a muni to a pre co up to a different structure. reats to the personal there cooperativeeot to privatize it? people don't want to change its structure. and that's does your book any of challenges that are political threats facing the co-op. not i. the question was, do has that been one of the attacks on co-ops that people want to privatize them the some of the ious did yeah yeah i'm not sure i would suspect that that is the case but i say for sure one of the key breakthroughs i learned about reading in his book was later down the line when they had become established, there became an issue where the cities be annexing and be the rurale would become part of an urban

then you know, we get to cover them and they happily foug that off. yeah. and one of the arguments back in the sixties is that, okay, the co-ops done their job. you know, theyenerzed rural texas. and why do we need them anymosef backed that idea. yeah, exactly. including clinton. yeah, i'm putting clinton was thinking maybe they had done ei and we don't need them anymore. but reagan wanted to raise the intereat from 2% to four, which would have been crippling them. yeah. well.dy e oh, well, that one. no, hold on. here comes a microphone vibe. you in your book, the transfer of electricity to these grid people that are communicating.

i mean they're using the public utilities to generate powerhe bitcoins know. i've been throughh used to have the alcoa plant where that was going. i think und ducah as well. right. yeah. yeah. this is not a technical book it's a book about power very aptly name, but it's about the people power. d also about a time when we had a govented it i its duty was to help people most in's a great story in that. it's we'll be 2 minutes early that's record. thank you very, very much. thank you all