Grounded in Co-op Pride
William Kaiser joins the rest of Co-op Country in saluting a special segment of the workforce April 14, National Lineworker Appreciation Day.
As a groundman in the late 1940s, Kaiser, 96, helped construct power lines in Central Texas for San Bernard Electric Cooperative.
He did so from the back of a Burma Jeep, unspooling line around Hallettsville, about halfway between San Antonio and Houston. Bringing electricity to rural Texas was backbreaking work in the years after co-ops got their start, and all these decades later, Kaiser is proud of his role.
“Somebody had to lay those lines out through the right-of-way so that they could hang the lines on the pole,” he says. “It takes a whole crew, many people, to get to where the lineman could do his job.”
A job, Kaiser notes, that wasn’t for him: “I’m not somebody who likes to get up in the air.”
Worth Repeating
“A flower blossoms for its own joy.”
—Oscar Wilde
A Texan Changes Baseball
Frank Robinson made baseball history 50 years ago this month when he became Major League Baseball’s first African American manager.
That was April 8, 1975, when Robinson, 39 at the time and still an active player, took charge of the Cleveland Indians, now called the Guardians. The Hall of Fame outfielder was born in Beaumont.
Hard-Driven Pioneer
A trailblazing engineer from Texas born 100 years ago this month led computing away from punched cards and paper tapes with his invention of a magnetic disk storage device. Louis Stevens led a team that in 1956 came up with the IBM 305 RAMAC, the forefather of all hard-drive disks.
Stevens was born April 15, 1925, in Post, southeast of Lubbock.
110,905
That was the number of George Strait fans who packed Kyle Field in College Station on June 15, 2024, setting records for the largest crowd ever at Texas A&M University’s stadium and for a ticketed concert in the U.S.
