Katie Phillips is old enough to remember the dark ages—when nightfall at her family’s farm outside Coleman meant navigating by the shadowy illumination offered by carbide and coal-oil lamps and lanterns. When much of the work on her dad’s dairy farm—milking, separating and bottling—happened before sunrise and without the benefit of electricity.
“It’s a hard life,” says Katie, who turns 97 next month. For her and her brother and two sisters growing up in the 1930s, there wasn’t much free time for fun, and before electricity, there was no reading or playing games at night.
Milking started every day at 3 a.m., and a few hours later, Katie’s dad, Charlie Pitts, was making the first of his twice-daily deliveries of Oak Grove Dairy Farm milk to homes, stores and cafés around Coleman, south of Abilene, on the western Central Texas plains.
It never escaped Pitts’ notice that just 4½ miles east, in town, folks had the luxury of electricity.
Back then in rural America, those 4½ miles might as well have been a million. Electricity stopped where the profits did, and in 1936, fewer than 3% of Texas farms had electricity.
But before long, farmers, ranchers and their neighbors pooled their money and worked together to build the electric cooperatives that lit up the countryside and brought a better quality of life.
Katie Phillips is among few living Americans who witnessed that important history. She had a front-row seat.
Katie turned 9 in 1936, the year her dad became a local leader in the cooperative movement that was in its early stages.
In those days, the town of Coleman had not only electricity but phone service too, and Pitts realized he needed that to keep up with milk orders. To get it, he paid to have a line strung from Coleman, across a creek, to the farm. Katie remembers their party line phone number: 4-0-0.
“I always wanted something better,” Pitts told the family.
Katie Phillips’ dad helped create Coleman County Electric Cooperative. She saw the co-op’s first light bulb flicker on in 1937.
Caytlyn Calhoun
Getting electricity to the farm was another matter.
Pitts traveled to Washington, D.C., to learn about the Rural Electrification Administration, which provided loans for the creation of cooperatives. He then visited neighboring farms, asking folks to contribute $5 to help start a co-op.
Finally, in April 1937, the first Coleman County Electric Cooperative light bulb flickered on in the Pitts farmhouse—an honor befitting the co-op’s first board president.
“It was a great day for everybody because it was a completion of a long journey for Daddy,” Katie says. The Pitts kids had better lighting for their schoolwork, and Dad had a perfect place to read the Fort Worth newspaper he always had in the house.
Soon lines brought power to the dairy barn, where milking machines freed up farmhands.
Katie remembers the first appliance in the house—a two-door refrigerator picked up at Gray Mercantile in town. It meant no more lugging ice home. “I just know that it was one of the most wonderful feelings there was when we could go to that refrigerator and open both doors and look in there and see what was in it,” Katie says.
Decades later, Katie spends a lot of her days knitting under a lamp in a corner of her living room in a 100-year-old farmhouse 6 miles east of Coleman. Electricity is too commonplace to warrant much thought. It powers her iPhone, tablet, two TVs and brand-new Singer sewing machine.
She’s known around Coleman County EC for being there at the dawn of the co-op. When the co-op held its 85th annual meeting in July 2023, she was there, and it was her 85th annual meeting too. She has attended every last one.
“The first light bulb was the beginning of an amazing future for all of us,” says Synda Smith, the co-op’s CEO and general manager. “There are few businesses that have a past connection like this. It feels so good to know that Katie still feels like we are doing what our earlier leaders wanted us to do by continuing to uphold the co-op business model.”
Katie has farmed most of her life around Coleman, except for two years in high school at Our Lady of the Lake in San Antonio. She dated Harold Phillips for a little less than a year—sometimes on horseback—and they married in 1948 when she was 21.
Together they farmed for 66 years, until he died in 2014. Harold was one of the first farmers in the area to grow sunflowers and to use parallel terracing. They had five children, four of whom are still living—all within five miles of Katie. Two of the sons are farmers.
Katie Phillips enjoys quilting—and air conditioning, ample lighting and watching TV.
Caytlyn Calhoun
By her 50th wedding anniversary, Katie figured she was ready to give up farming, and she broke that news to Harold.
“I told him, ‘I think I’ve done enough now,’ ” Katie says. “And he said, ‘What would encourage you to do a little more?’
“I said, ‘You buy me an air-conditioned, four-wheel-drive tractor.’ ”
And that’s how she ended up the proud owner of a John Deere tractor that’s still in the family.
Katie, who says she needed no prescriptions until she turned 90, has other family heirlooms that she holds dear: A six-leaf table brought by covered wagon from Louisiana by Katie’s great-grandparents in the mid-1800s graces her dining room, and there’s a couple of glider-style chairs that her mother bought in New York and the chair her dad used to rock her to sleep.
But the greatest treasure might be Charlie Pitts’ old desk chair, the very one where he worked out the wrinkles and legal details of creating the electric utility that gave his kids—and his community—a brighter future.
And Katie still has a direct connection to the co-op office in town. One of her six grandchildren, Kathreyn Portis, is a member services representative at Coleman County EC, where she has worked almost four years.
“My family’s legacy in this county is a big one, so to get to be able to continue that means a lot to me,” Portis says. “Family isn’t just blood relatives. It’s these people,” she says of her three dozen colleagues at the co-op.
They all follow in the footsteps of a dairy farmer who wanted to leave the dark ages behind.
As Katie knits or quilts or watches her beloved Dallas Cowboys, she joins nearly 5,000 fellow co-op members in her community living a better life because of co-op power.
But she alone remembers that day in 1937 when her dad helped that first light bulb come on.
“It was magical,” Katie says. “It’s just the greatest thing in the world. When he found out that you could get electricity, he said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ ”
