Bill wrote:
....

When I registered for the electrical service at the house, I became
a shareholder of some special "cooperative corporation". ...

That 'some special "cooperative corporation"' is your rural electric
co-operative _association_, a member-owned entity.

In most rural areas there wasn't a high-enough population density that
the public or private utilities gave a rat's patootie about so didn't
get access to public power until folks in those areas joined together
and formed local cooperatives to do so. Areas such as yours, while now
in residential subdivisions, were out of areas served otherwise and many
are still being served by the co-ops.

As an example, I mentioned earlier that folks were part of organizing
our local REC; they began collecting signatures/commitments in earnest
in late 1945 when it became clear that V-J Day couldn't be _too_ far
away. From that time it wasn't until 1948 we finally got power to the
farmstead/house. (Up until then, used the old Delco wind-powered
generator and a bank of storage batteries in the house basement (these
were 32 VDC systems) and a small backup gasoline-powered generator.

There are still areas in even more rural areas where such systems are
widespread enough still that one can find appliances built for them.
Weyburn, SK, is one that still had a co-op store when I was last there
about 5 years ago or so.

....
... As it happens, I found out yeterday that there is an annual meeting of the
electrical corporation next month--with a drawing for some pretty big prizes
(it must be hard to get people to go!). Maybe I can pick up more info there.

Again, it's a _co-operative_, not a "corporation".

Since it is a co-operative, it is customer-owned and important to have
enough folks to show up for the annual meetings to have a quorum and
thereby save the expense of having special ballots, etc., to confirm
your new board of directors (who will be other customers from the
various service regions) and other annual business. My IN geography
isn't good enough to guess which one might be the one serving you; that
undoubtedly also depends on which side of the city you're on; it's
unlikely one local co-op has all the surrounding service territory in
each direction.

As the city-fication of these formerly almost all rural co-ops
continues, it is, indeed, generally harder to get the suburban members
involved as they don't have a clue as to what it took to actually get
power to serve them as will many of the older members whose folks or
grandparents were, like mine, the ones who "made it happen".

Again, that's not a personal dig, simply that it is so that the folks
moving into these subdivisions such as yours are almost all urban and
simply think of the power-co as being a necessary evil that "just is".
The idea of having actually created one's own utility is just a totally
foreign concept to them and they tend to be totally disinterested as
long as the lights come on when they flip a switch.

/Warning-Anothergeezerstoryahead
Not only did we have no electric power until REA reached us, up until I
was in HS in the 60s we maintained our own telephone lines up to within
1/2-mi of town which was the closest interconnection point to the Bell
lines and service.

Many other areas had to do the similar thing as the REC's in order to
have any phone service at all--they formed local telephone co-ops, many
of which are still the local service providers in this general area.

Anothergeezerstoryfinished (and I promise I'll stop)/

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