One day in October 1935, Beauford Johnson composed a letter to the editor targeting all the little weekly newspapers in rural Pine County, Minnesota. He couldn't have foreseen that he was starting a civic bonfire that wouldn't burn out until thousands of Minnesota farms had been electrified.

Today, the co-op that did the job, East Central Energy, serves some 67,000 consumer-members living and working along 8,564 miles of distribution line crossing 14 counties.

Johnson's letter said that the new Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in Washington, D.C. had $100 million to loan to groups of farmers to organize and incorporate electric cooperatives, and—critical in those desperate Depression days—“no lien is placed on the farmer's property" and “the directors are not personally liable."

“Pine County farmers ought to organize in order to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity made available by the government," he continued. And they should act fast “before the money made available is gobbled up by the private utility interests to further their own interests."

Encouraged by the feedback he got from the letter, Johnson, a Pine County farmer himself, called a meeting at the schoolhouse in Rock Creek, and invited J. H. Hay, the state's deputy commissioner of agriculture to speak. Some of the farmers in the audience had already heard his pitch on REA at a fair in neighboring Kanabec County and were eager to hear more details.

"Don't delay," Hay urged. “The money is there waiting to be used. If you organize your cooperative now, you will be that much closer to the day when electricity will come to your farms."

Hay spoke again at a meeting in Grasston, after which five men, including Johnson, incorporated a co-op that REA referred to as Kanabec 1 until a permanent name was chosen.

That happened at a November 1935 meeting at Braham High School; the organizers chose P.I.C.K. Electric Cooperative for the first letter of each participating county, Pine, Isanti, Chisago and Kanabec. (The co-op grew out of that name in 1946 and changed to East Central Electric Association, and then, in 1999, East Central Energy.)

A slate of directors and officers were elected at the meeting. Johnson was elected treasurer, and in January 1936 the co-op set up a temporary office in the Braham Journal building. Johnson also was named sign-up coordinator. He was paid $4 a day plus 4 cents a mile for the use of his car.

“We would get started at 8 or 8:30 and work until 10 or 10:30 at night," Johnson recalled when he was interviewed for The Night They Turned On the Lights, a book published by the Minnesota Rural Electric Association in 1962 and the primary source for this article. “It was a farm-to-farm campaign, and at each place we would have to explain our program, argue away the objections and try to get the farmer's name on the membership blank plus his $2.50."

P.I.C.K. Electric received word on August 22, 1936, that REA had approved a loan for $81,000 to build 80 miles of distribution line. The first pole was erected just short of a year later.

By this time, the board of directors had asked Johnson to manage the co-op and he continued to do so up into the 1960s. His goal was to have the first section of line energized by Christmas—as a “gift" to the membership.

The first to open his present was Rock Creek farmer Carl Peterson. The lights came on at his home at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 23, 1937. The second was neighbor Swan Hammer. But he and his family didn't know it until they arrived home after midnight from a holiday party.

Before they did, two linemen and Johnson turned on the radio and every light in the farmstead, the barn and the chicken house. Christmas music blasted from the radio, and the co-op employees hoped it would still be playing when the Hammers pulled into the farmyard.