An unscripted success

Terry Graham was looking for a good job. 50 years later, it’s been a great career.

In the summer of 1973, 20-year-old Terry Graham wasn’t sure where his life was going. The Good Hope High School graduate had spent several years at St. Bernard College, but thought maybe it was time to find a job. His roommate at the time had worked that summer on a right-of-way crew at Cullman Electric Cooperative, and suggested Terry see if the co-op had any open positions.

“I came on a Friday to see the manager, Mr. Claude Wood,” Graham said. “We talked and he told me to come back on Monday and they’d have something for me to do.”

50 years later, Graham is still showing up for work at Cullman Electric. An article in the April 1974 issue of Alabama Rural Electric Magazine introduced Graham as the co-op’s newest meter reader, having been hired on Sept. 6, 1973.

“They had me sized up to be on a right of way crew,” Graham said, recalling his first day on the job. “That’s typically where most folks started, and I was accustomed to working with a chainsaw on the farm. I was standing there on the dock, and I’ll never forget, here came Louie Howell and he said, ‘You come with me. You’re going to start reading meters.’

“I trained for about a week and they turned me loose. The first book I read was No.123 which went from Cold Springs all the way to Dodge City. I read on it for about two days and on the third day they took it from me and gave it to somebody else. They must have thought I was never going to finish that thing.”

Technology has changed the world — and Cullman Electric — dramatically throughout Graham’s career. When he started, the co-op didn’t have a bucket truck or a single computer. Eight meter readers drove more than 120 routes each month to start the billing process for the co-op’s 22,000 meters.

“We’d bring the meter books in when we finished reading them, pack those books in suitcases, take them over to the Greyhound bus station and send them to Tupelo, Mississippi,” Graham explained. “They’d process the readings and print the bills, put them back into the suitcases and send them back to us. Then we’d take them back to the office, get them ready for the mail and carry them over to the post office.”

Today, automated electric meters send hourly data reports to the co-op’s office. A state-of-the-art fleet of trucks, digital tools and automated equipment help employees manage more than 47,500 meters.

“Before the meters we have today, when we talked to members about high bills, I could only see what was used the past 30 days compared to last month and last year,” Graham said. “That’s all I could tell you. Now I can pull it up and see exactly how many kilowatt hours every hour that you used. I’ve dealt with it so much I can almost look at it and tell exactly when someone started having a problem like their heat strips sticking on the heat pump.”

Graham wasn’t always certain he’d spend his entire professional life at Cullman Electric. After getting married to his wife, Brenda, in 1981, they built chicken houses and started farming, something his family still does today.

“I told her I was not going to collect light bills the rest of my life,” Graham said. “Brenda was a school teacher and took a few years off when our daughters were born, and I told her when she went back to teaching that I was going to quit and run the farm. But by that time I had been promoted to meter supervisor and I got off the collection routes.”

The second half of Graham’s co-op career has included time managing the member services department, working with commercial and industrial accounts, resolving high bill complaints, and overseeing day-to-day operations at the co-op’s Addison facility.

Looking back over his career, Graham said he’s enjoyed interacting with the co-op’s employees and members, and seeing how much progress has been made.

“People always like to give the younger generations a hard time, but you’ve got some good folks here now. It’s in capable hands,” Graham said. “They’ve got the formal training that a lot of us old schoolers didn’t have, and they’ll be able to keep advancing it.”

Graham’s milestone work anniversary does not mark the finish line for his career. He plans to keep showing up on Monday mornings, focused on the same thing he has been for the past 50 years — delivering reliable, affordable electricity to the members of Cullman Electric Cooperative.

“Working here I’ve been able to provide a good life for my family,” Graham said. “If you were going to script it out where I came from to now, I don’t think I could have written a script any better.” n