Chapter One

 

Being There

An Autobiographical Account of My Life and Times at Glasgow EPB

William J. Ray

 

It was certainly not hard to see that my time at Glasgow EPB might come to a halt suddenly, and now the time appears to be at hand. I agreed to a settlement with the EPB that will have me stepping down from my role as Superintendent, and assuming a temporary role of Advisor/Consultant, effective March 1. I will retire completely from Glasgow EPB by the end of summer 2021.

Since I’ve outlasted nearly everyone that has memories of the last 40 years of the 60-year history of Glasgow EPB, it strikes me that, “Who tells your story?” is a legitimate concern, so I’m going to record it for posterity. But there is more to what happened in my life than just a series of events and people. The culmination of the people and events of my career produced a glimpse into what is possible. This autobiographical essay is published in the hope that others can grasp what we glimpsed, and, hopefully, use it as a basis to carry on the voyage of discovery.

One might say that I have been in the electric utility business since my birth in 1954. My Dad worked for Farmers RECC when I was born, and I studied him intently, so I could someday drive a car with a two-way radio in it, with a big whip antenna. Although I studied my Dad in my youth, my real experience in the utility business started on May 12, 1975. That was the day I walked into Bowling Green Electric Plant Board (it became BGMU a few years later) to take a job as Draftsman, while I was still attending WKU and majoring in Civil Engineering. That was over 45 years ago.

The combination of the classes I was taking at WKU, and the opportunities to constantly pester experienced staff at BGMU for answers, really worked well for my understanding of how the electric grid works. While I continued to progress slowly at WKU, my real education in the mid-70’s came from my mentors: Gene Laughlin, Jim Hoagland, Gary Stallons, and B.H. Kissler. I only hope they knew how much their teaching meant to me, because it meant everything to my career. To this day, whether it is in the throes of a big power outage, a daunting personnel decision, or some other big problem that I need help with, I mentally call out to them.

Things were going great for me and BGMU back then. Mary and I had a son, Bradley, in 1978, shortly after we bought our first home. But then things at BGMU went sour. Lest you think that the rise of devious and misinformed politicians is something invented in Glasgow, let me assure you that, for me, it was first seen in Bowling Green. In 1982 a group of newly elected locals, and a particularly hate-filled Mayor, formed a junta that became determined to destroy BGMU – beginning with the firing of the CEO, Henry Carlisle. As the months rolled by after the junta took power, Henry Carlisle was fired, and each of the brilliant instructors mentioned above, one-by-one, left BGMU for retirement or better jobs, which did not include working for ham-fisted hacks appointed by confused politicians, bereft of ethics. That left me, at 27 years old, effectively in charge of designing and operating Bowling Green’s power grid. 

Meanwhile, back in Glasgow, titans of the community held office, and populated the boards of essential services, like Glasgow EPB. William Bryant, Robert A. Lessenberry, Norma Redford, Don Doty, and Jack Goodman, oblivious to the insanity gripping BGMU, were making plans to acquire licenses to convert Corps of Engineers dams in the region, to provide clean and efficient hydroelectric power for Glasgow. Into that vast void between the destructive thinking in Bowling Green, and the thoughtful wisdom which existed in Glasgow politics, serendipity began to flourish. For me, that manifested itself in my seeing an advertisement for a new Superintendent at Glasgow EPB. In Bowling Green, it seemed clear that everyone who knew anything about the grid, was departing -- taking their expertise with them and leaving a bleak future for BGMU. In Glasgow, I saw my parents, my in-laws, and the wonderful community that Mary and I both still called “home.” By November 1983, I became that new Superintendent, the one who got to pick up those hydroelectric power licenses and try to make viable projects out of them. I also got to leave the divisive politics of Bowling Green behind. Everything about this move was a win!

This obviously applies to us all...wonder how we can convince everyone?

Mountain group says Ky. needs to grow own businesses

By Bill Wolfe • bwolfe@courier-journal.com • August 25, 2008

Kentucky needs to offer stronger support for entrepreneurs and focus more on developing home-grown businesses rather than on recruiting businesses from outside, according to a report commissioned by the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development.

The report, released today, said the state “faces serious challenges” in its small-business activity, lagging the national average in growth rates and income. Kentucky “has much work to do in expanding entrepreneurship across the state.”

“Kentucky as a whole has not made adequate economic progress over the last 30 years,” Jason Bailey, research and policy director for the association, said in an interview. “We are largely stuck in an old approach to economic development that’s really based on recruiting industry with the use of tax incentives.”

That approach is part of economic development, “but increasingly it’s not enough, and states need to turn more of their attention to promoting growth from within,” Bailey said.

The report said Kentucky has many of the tools needed to foster small businesses, such as programs of the state Cabinet for Economic Development and at state universities, community colleges and technical colleges. “Challenges remain in connecting the dots” between various programs, however, and there is a general lack of awareness and lack of appreciation of the potential of homegrown development, it said.

Recommendations included broad-based “entrepreneurship education,” more access to microlending, seed capital and angel investing and the creation of an Entrepreneurship and Small Business Commission

The report doesn’t make specific recommendations on the amount of money that would be needed or where it would come from, Bailey said.

The report was written by the Rural Policy Research Institute’s Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, a national research and policy center created in 2001. The Mountain Association is a 32-year-old community development organization that works in eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia.

Reporter Bill Wolfe can be reached at (502) 582-4248.

You got to watch this

Wish we could go to this conference...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/michael_pollan_gives_a_plant_s_eye_view.html

The Last Lecture...

Mary and I decided to extend a business trip into a little vacation last week. I had to be in Covington, KY and I had this nagging urge to get on the Blue Ridge Parkway again. I wanted to be somewhere quiet, somewhere with little cell phone coverage, somewhere where commercial traffic and commercial establishments are not allowed. I wanted to take the new Mini out somewhere and get lost with it. I did that...and some of what I wanted to achieve was out there, but a lot of it was not possible. The worst of it was that Randy Pausch died while I was gone.

Like millions of others, I felt like I knew him from the "Last Lecture" he gave that attracted so much attention over the last few months. He was such a beautiful soul...well worth saving, yet he was not saved. I cannot explain why this man and his words and his premature passing have had such an effect on me. Maybe it is because his story is all of our stories...it is just that his video of our life was, perhaps, on fast forward. And, in a way, his story is also applicable to what I saw and experienced on my recent journey.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is in Virginia and North Carolina. It is sort of a road, sort of a National Park, but much more than the simple combination of the two. The construction of the parkway started during the depth of the Great Depression. FDR hatched many ideas in his effort to save democracy from itself during the 30's. While I am particularly fond of another of his ideas, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Blue Ridge Parkway is certainly the most beautiful of all of them. BRP was not built by professional road builders. It was actually built by folks of all walks of life who had one thing in common; they needed a job and they needed hope that the ravages of capitalism run amok would not mean that they would be standing in bread lines for the rest of their lives. In eternal thanks for the jobs that came with the parkway, they built something that transcends the plans they were executing. They built a work of art that you can experience in a car or on foot instead of in a museum. They built something that expresses their thanks for saving their lives.

The route of the parkway is simply the Jugular vein of North America. It runs down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, and, most importantly, is protected from all that is modern and flashy and glitzy. Traffic moves slowly there, the speed limit is 45 MPH, but you really never notice that, for even though modern vehicles normally strain to go that slowly, on the parkway the veil of quiet and peace (only interrupted sporadically by occasional immature motorcycle riders who still feel the need to alter the exhaust systems on their rides so as to attract maximum attention and wreak maximum havoc on the rest of us), acts as sort of a semi-solid medium that impedes the progress of all vehicles...and no one seems to complain. Like Randy Pausch, it is a beautiful place, with a supremely valuable soul, and, like Randy, it is sick and needs redemption.

I don't know the politics of funding for national treasures like the parkway, but I can tell you that something is wrong there. Miles and miles of the most beautiful portions of the parkway are now closed due to landslides, rock slides, and general failures of roadway. The Jugular vein is clogged. To navigate around these closures, those seeking the comfort of the parkway's last lecture are forced from the embrace of the parkway into the obscene cacophony of trucks and fast food joints that makes up the world outside of the parkway. A conspiracy theorist might conclude that the parkway is being persecuted for its aversion to commerce and that the folks seeking refuge in its arms are being forced out into the commercial world where certain forces feel we all belong...oh well, that is what an conspiracy theorist might say.

All I know for sure is that the parkway is in need of better funding and more work. It is a soul worth saving. It seems that all the king's horses and all the king's men were not able to put Randy Pausch back together again, but I know we can save the Blue Ridge Parkway. It has many more lectures left in it for all of us, and I hope all of us are willing to communicate with our elected leaders that we want this little sliver of heaven saved and we want it fixed and we want it open to receive us now. Tomorrow is too late.

Travis should not have gotten this started...

It was he, after all, who started us down the path to sustainability and localism by giving out copies of Deep Economy. After that came Omnivore's Dilemma and now I just finished The Small-Mart Revolution. Now I cannot sleep at night. When I do I dream about what we could do to awaken Glasgow so that everyone can experience this epiphany. There are so many things that need doing. We need to study where money leaks out of our economy. We need to help everyone understand those leaks. We need a database of truly local businesses. We need a way to make sure everyone knows about them. We need to help everyone understand why we should be bending over backwards to patronize those businesses. We need to form a database of businesses that we need to plug the money leaking out. We need, we need, we need. This is really more than we can expect Stephen Biggers to take on by himself.

In fact, the more I think about it. I don't know how many people it would take to really start making a dent in all of this. Want to get together and tilt at windmills?

It Aint Just in South Africa

Check out this link
to a story from the LA Times. This is not just an interesting little bit about something happening a world away. There is another utility whose sales of energy far outstrip their capacity to produce. This utility is a bit more local, but they too have allowed low energy costs to send an incorrect signal to the public which resulted in sales leaping far ahead of where they should. The name of that utility is TVA. These are the folks who also serve Glasgow. Everything in that story could be written about our region of the US within a couple of years. Is that relaxing?