May 30, 1966, was a Monday. It was also Memorial Day, but still a workday since the last Monday in May wouldn’t become a federal holiday until 1971.
Lyndon Johnson occupied the White House. Meanwhile, in Georgia, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter was running for governor.
Radio stations were playing new songs by Loretta Lynn and the Beatles. A 5-pound bag of sugar cost 49 cents, and a new GE electric range was $139 at the Goodyear store in Monroe.
Folks watched Lucy and Andy Griffith on TV that night. The Class of 1966 at Loganville High School collected their diplomas, too.
Kent Brown doesn’t recall these trivial points about the 30th day of May in 1966. But he remembers the most important detail: It was his first day of work at Walton EMC.
Now, more than 60 years later, Kent is celebrating his final day on the job at the cooperative. On June 12, co-workers, family and friends are gathering at Walton EMC’s Monroe office for a festive retirement sendoff for the co-op’s director of operations and longest-tenured employee.
As others prepare for the party, Kent settles in for a talk about his career. There’s plenty to unpack when reviewing a work life that has spanned seven decades.
How it happened
Kent was a 19-year-old cotton farmer working his family’s Walton County land in the spring of 1966. He was supplementing his income with a $60-per-week job at a Monroe fertilizer plant. His positive attitude and work ethic didn’t go unnoticed by his supervisor Paul Verner.
Verner was also a member of the Walton EMC Board of Directors at the time, Kent explains. The co-op was experiencing tremendous growth and looking to hire more linemen to build lines in the expanding service area.
“One day Mr. Verner comes up to me and says, ‘Would you like to have a good job with a good company?’” Kent recalls about the question that changed his life.
A job interview conducted in the home of a co-op official followed that evening. Kent was hired as the newest Walton EMC lineman.
“It was a crazy way to do it, but that’s how we did it then,” Kent recalls about the unorthodox hiring process. Ironically, as director of operations he would end up interviewing hundreds of potential co-op employees — all in an office during business hours, he points out.
The co-op lineman
The following Monday Kent traveled just four miles from his family home to his new job. His destination: Walton EMC’s corporate office, a smaller version of the administrative and warehouse complex that still sits in the crook of Highway 78 and Mt. Vernon Road a few miles northeast of downtown Monroe.
“I came to work at 8 o’clock and went out with the crew that day. Everything was on-the-job training,” he said, pointing out the significant difference in how co-op linemen learned their job in the 1960s versus now. Today, new linemen recruits sign on for a seven-year apprenticeship that combines classroom instruction, independent study and on-the-job experience.
In the 1960s co-op linemen typically climbed utility poles to perform work on overhead lines. The use of hydraulic-assisted bucket trucks for routine line work wouldn’t come into widespread use for another 15 years.
Kent learned to climb poles early in his training. Physically fit from farming, he proved to be a natural at going up a pole. Coming down was a different story.
“I didn’t really realize how high up you are when you get to the top. Thirty feet is way up there!” he said, recalling the first time he successfully scaled a pole. “I liked to have never gotten down that first time!”
Bringing light
After five years training as an apprentice, Kent spent 25 years as a Walton EMC journeyman lineman. That time would include four years as a line crew supervisor before becoming superintendent of linemen for the Monroe district.
With his characteristic positive attitude, Kent embraced the role of being a lineman. He was proud to perform an important service for his community.
“It was a job that had to be done, so I just put everything I had into it,” he said. “I climbed poles every day and loved it. And I liked figuring out how to fix things.”
Much about the job has changed over the decades. For instance, the 1960s lineman wasn’t alerted to outages by a dispatcher calling from the Walton EMC headquarters. Instead, members telephoned his home — at all hours of the day and night, weekends and holidays — to ask for his help.
“I didn’t even have a phone when I started working at the co-op. Walton EMC put one in at my house, and my wife would have to take messages if I wasn’t there,” he said. “We didn’t have radios, pagers or mobile phones back then, so I’d have to drive all the way home from one call to find out where I had to go next.”
The co-op service area was also a very different place when Kent began setting poles and stringing power lines. Atlanta’s suburban sprawl was just beginning to inch eastward into Gwinnett County, and Walton EMC customer-owners still had rural addresses.
Kent had a front-row seat to the area’s transformation into suburbia during the 1970s and 1980s. “Every pole, every line — we built that,” he said about working on a crew that developed the power infrastructure still serving Snellville today. He recalls “working 10 hours a day” to build power lines in the then-rural area that had one store, a police station and a gas station surrounded by farms and cattle.
Championing reliability
Kent hung up his climbing gear in 1994 to become the co-op’s first director of operations. For more than 30 years he has overseen the functions and personnel directly involved in keeping Walton EMC’s promise of delivering safe, reliable electricity. It’s a responsibility he takes seriously.
“We’re here to serve the people and keep the lights on,” he said, repeating a phrase he preaches to all those he supervises. “I’m extremely proud of the co-op’s 99.99% reliability.”
One essential key to maintaining reliability is quality personnel. Kent takes pride in his ability to spot potential talent — individuals who possess the physical and intellectual capabilities, as well as the heart, to be a co-op lineman. The savvy veteran recruiter hired all but one of the 101 co-op employees he currently supervises.
A storm story
Kent says there have been many memorable moments during his career. There were a few accidents and even more close calls, he admits. But there were also times of celebration when a challenge was overcome.
No lineman’s memories would be complete without a good “storm story.” For Kent, that memory involves the Winter Storm of 1973. It remains the worst weather event to occur in northern Georgia since 1935.
Kent was a journeyman lineman then. Without the weather forecasting available today, he and other co-op linemen were left to wait and see what would happen when the storm began on Saturday, Jan. 7.
Within two hours, heavy freezing rain and sleet dumped more than 4 inches of ice on roads, trees and power lines, causing significant power outages and bringing the co-op’s service area to a frozen standstill. Determined to restore heat and lights for co-op customer-owners, linemen headed out as soon as the first outage reports came in. The going was slow and treacherous, Kent recalled.
The ice accumulation was weighing down power lines and destroying the power grid. Kent remembers: “Poles were breaking faster than we could fix them. At one place where we had just finished a repair, a falling pole barely missed our truck.”
By the time he finished a restoration on Hog Mountain, Kent had been working 38 hours nonstop. “I got the lights back on, but I didn’t remember how I got there or anything that I’d done,” he recalls about experiencing a frightening episode of severe exhaustion. That day he learned the valuable lesson that even linemen must give in to their physical limits.
Ready for retirement
Having worked well beyond his retirement eligibility, Kent says it’s now time to go. He has some other projects to tackle.
First on the chore list is a refurbishment of the 1840 farmhouse where he was born. It’s on the farm where he’s lived his entire life and drove away from on the morning he joined Walton EMC. He also has a collection of antique John Deere tractors he wants to “work on and play with.”
His retirement to-do list also includes experiencing a storm in a way he never could as a co-op employee. “I’m going to sit on my porch and watch the storms roll in — just admire it as a God thing and not have to go to work if there’s an outage,” he muses.
As he begins counting the hours until retirement begins, Kent admits there are things he’ll miss, especially his co-workers. “I love the guys. Everybody’s like my family,” he said.
He also expresses appreciation for his longtime work home. “The pay was good, and the company has always been a good place to be,” he said about Walton EMC.
He hopes he’ll be remembered as someone who gave as much as he received.
“I have spent my whole career trying to keep the lights on, and I’m proud of that,” he summarized. “It’s important to do a good job, no matter what that job is, and I’ve always tried to do that.”
Congratulations and thank you for your years of service, Kent Brown.
