It didn't take long in 1995 for the NRECA board of directors to agree on the subject for the statue they wanted for the lobby of the association's new national headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Those 47 directors decided it would be, “The Lineman."

Linemen like Wyoming's Dick Brown, who was the model for the statue, and Georgia's Terry Ward, who liked his job best when a heavy snowfall in the mountains meant long hours of cold, wet work getting the lights back on for thousands of co-op members.

“If a big storm's coming, it's not like you're dreading it – you're excited!" he told RE Magazine in 1997.

A lineman from an earlier era, Montana's Sig Salveson, expressed some of the same sentiments.

“We lost a lot of sleep, but it's kind of hard sleeping knowing someone's out of power."

Salverson spent 36 years out on the line for Big Flat Electric Cooperative in Malta, Montana. His first day on the job was October 14, 1947, four days after the distribution system was energized.

Years after retiring, he admitted that the sound of a storm brewing in the middle of the night could stir him from a sound sleep – ready to roll.

“A lineman is a lineman 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, on call as much or more as a doctor," said former Indiana lineman Curt Irven. 

When the NRECA board commissioned Wyoming sculptor Beverly Paddleford to create and cast a bronze sculpture, the nation's 900 electric co-ops employed about 9,500 men and 21 women in three lineworker categories: line superintendent, lineman and lineman trainee. They averaged 40 years of age and 14 years at their co-op. Average pay was $17.52 an hour (today it's close to $40), which was pretty good money in a small town or rural area in 1995.

From the early days of rural electrification, linemen were mythic figures. They climbed 45-foot poles and hoisted 500-pound transformers skyward with nothing more than a pulley. They strung the miles and miles of copper lines that transformed rural America from a place of hardship to hope.

Today, hydraulics carry linemen and transformers to the top of power poles, but like firefighters and EMTs, they're still local heroes to millions of Americans.

Paddleford, who with her husband Monte operates Eagle Bronze in Lander, Wyoming, one of the largest art foundries in the U.S., captures the mythic and heroic qualities in The Lineman, her first monumental sculpture when it was dedicated in the NRECA building on December 10, 1996. One-and-a-quarter life size and ruggedly built, a climbing belt hanging from his hip, he commands one end of the long, marble-floored lobby.

Don Torgersen, chairman at the time of the NRECA's board's Fine Arts Committee, described the statue as “the co-ops' Everyman. I believe rural electric people will see in the sculpture something of themselves; what they have given in service to their co-op."

The inscription on a plaque at The Lineman's feet honors the men and women who with “grit and sweat and vision" transformed rural America from a place of  “despair and darkness" to one of  “hope and light."