By Denise Gamino
Nearly 90 years ago, a widowed mother chose to starve to death in a Fayette County jail cell rather than die in the electric chair for the killing of a farmhand. She lost 150 fatal pounds. Before she died, Mary Dach wished aloud to someday be free, and to get a job in the jail that confined her. Perhaps she did.
When Hurricane Laura made landfall in the early hours of Aug. 27, 2020, its devastating winds, rain and storm surge left hundreds of thousands of people without power across Louisiana and East Texas. Central Texans dodged damage from this storm, which enabled Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative to help out hard-hit utilities.
To better serve members in the fast-growing western portion of its service area, Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative has opened a new service center for field operations personnel in Caldwell County.
Employees began working out of the facility located between San Marcos and Lockhart in Maxwell this summer. The facility will give line workers and other field employees access to needed material, tools, equipment and fuel, and ultimately reduce outage response times in Hays, Caldwell, Gonzales, Guadalupe and surrounding counties.
BY ED CROWELL
When Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative powered the first light bulbs in rural Central Texas in 1939, the World’s Fair in New York was unveiling an all-electric home with a dazzling kitchen, complete with a refrigerator, electric range, dishwasher, coffee maker, garbage disposal, food mixer and an automatic toaster.
BY BEN WEAR
Dock Jackson grew up on the road to Houston. But back then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the “highway” from Austin to the coastal plains that passed through Bastrop was just a small-town street named Chestnut. From the front yard of his childhood home, Jackson could watch travelers making their heedless way through the town of about 3,000. After some time spent in Austin, Dallas and New York as a young man, he returned home and served 24 years on the Bastrop City Council.
Story by Ed Crowell
Military troops learn to live and sleep in unusual spots — from inside a desert foxhole to wedged between a rock and a hard place.
Now, some Texas soldiers will have an opportunity to rest, comfortably, in a revolutionary new barracks in Bastrop County.
At Camp Swift — the National Guard’s main training facility in Texas — some troops will sleep in the largest structure in North America built by a giant robotic 3D printer.
