Noel “Buster” Lindemann remembered that his mother had had it with cooking on a wood stove—she wanted an electric range. He also knew that the nearby town of Cost already had electricity, and that his father, Milton, and his uncle ran Lindemann Bros. General Merchandise there, selling Westinghouse electric ranges along with many other items valued by both townspeople and farm families.

These memories were from 1938, when Buster was six years old. He was one of the old timers interviewed for the 75th anniversary book, Your Kind of Power, that Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative published in 2013.

GVEC is based in Gonzales, a county seat town about 75 miles east of San Antonio. It energized its first line on January 15, 1940. The line served 150 members in a rural area west of Gonzales. Two months later, a second line serving 170 members was energized outside of Cost. Today the co-op serves more than 99,000 consumers in 13 counties.

Central Power & Light Company, the investor-owned utility that served Gonzales in the late 1930s, wanted $1,000 to extend a line less than half a mile to the Lindemann’s 350-acre farm. This seemed unfair to Milton at a time when a new car cost $625. Neighboring farmers were getting similarly high quotes.

He had been paying close attention the activities of the federal Rural Electrification Administration and its Texas partner, the State Grange. On October 14, 1938, he met in Cost with other farmers and business leaders to discuss getting a loan from REA to build 100 miles of line.

A few days later, the group hired a lawyer and an engineer, and before the year was out GVEC had filed its incorporation papers. Nine of the founders were elected to the board of directors, and they, in turn, elected Milton as president. He served on the board for the next 15 years.

Your Kind of Power says Lindemann and the other directors “spent considerable time in the spring of 1939 crisscrossing the county on horseback to sign up new members.” A membership cost $5.

It was a job for which Milton was well-suited. “Daddy had a lot of friends. He knew a lot of people. He was a good organizer. People liked him. People trusted him,” Buster remembered.

Milton and his board colleagues worked hard to meet REA’s consumer density requirement of three members per mile of line. Their diligence paid off with a $166,000 REA loan. A second loan, for $190,000 was approved a year later. 

By the end of that year, 1940, GVEC had built 450 milers of line serving 820 consumers. After a contractor built the lines along the main roads, a four-man co-op crew extended them to the farm yards. The crew dug holes with long-handled spoon shovels and installed poles with an A-frame and a winch on the back of a one and a half-ton truck, according to Your Kind of Power. 

GVEC was planning a third round of construction when World War II intervened; non-essential projects couldn’t get steel, aluminum, copper and other materials. The co-op grew, instead, by acquiring 230 miles of line between Sequin and the eastern outskirts of San Antonio formerly owned by San Antonio Public Service Company. That added 1,600 consumers to the co-op’s membership.

GVEC increased the size of that third construction project after Japan surrendered in August 1945—and kept growing after that. “Much of the postwar demand for electric service in rural areas of Texas came from the farm wife,” the authors of Your Kind of Power say. “Appliances had become commonplace, more affordable and increasingly convenient. Farm wives on the GVEC system wanted access to electric refrigerators, toasters, water heaters, washing machines and dozens of other labor-saving devices.”

Buster Lindemann’s mother got her electric range. And his sister, Carol, who married a returning veteran in 1947, remembered in her Your Kind of Power interview how refreshing it felt to switch on an electric fan on a 100-dgree summer day in the years before central air conditioning.