The projects the cooperatives take on vary. They’ve painted and cleaned streetlights and buildings in Ethel, stained a deck at a nursing home, built a backstop for a local ballfield, planted flowers throughout downtowns and more. Today, they’re building a chain-link fence outside of the former elementary school in Clarence.

“A member saw a need in Clarence for a daycare, so they’re renting part of the old school to start that,” says Rebecca. “Even though there’s a park right here, they need to have a fenced outdoor area for the kids to play.”

Co-ops In Action takes applications for projects. Then a small selection committee reviews and determines which ones fit the bill. “We have to be sure to pick projects that can be completed in a day or two and don’t cause any safety concerns for our workers,” Rebecca says. “Once we select a project, we pick a date and gather volunteers.”

All the materials for the projects are provided by the requesting group. Co-ops In Action just provides the know-how and manpower to complete the project.

“The whole reason for cooperatives was to take care of a need that no one was going to do,” says Macon Electric CEO/General Manager Tim Korman. “When we started it was because other utilities wouldn’t stretch their lines out in the rural areas because it wasn’t going to pay off. From the conception, it was to help those who needed it.”

Rebecca says the project goes beyond a kind deed. “From an economic development standpoint, it’s awesome because we’re bettering the lives of our members and improving our community,” she says. “Hopefully more people will in turn want to move here and have businesses here.”

While Co-ops In Action shows off the seventh cooperative principle — Concern for Community — the fifth principle — Education, Training and Information — can be found in Macon Electric’s school program.

The co-op offers the program — intended for grades 3 to 5 — to all the schools in their service area. The one-hour presentation teaches the students more about electricity and how to stay safe around it.

“The thing I love most about the program is Safety Manager Dan Ulhorn starts the program by asking the students: ‘What’s your most important safety tool around electricity?’ ” Rebecca says. “They all yell out something tangible that might help them and he tells them it’s their brain. It opens their eyes to how important it is.”

The interactive program includes a tabletop demonstration with miniature power lines and other safety topics. A lineworker joins the demonstration as well and explains all the different equipment they use and a volunteer is selected to try it on. They go over what to do if a power line falls on their bus or a car they’re in with their family.

Whether it’s painting the side of a building in their service area, teaching students to be safe, rounding up dollars to be given away to those in need or sending students to Washington, D.C. for the Missouri Youth Tour, Macon Electric makes it a point to be front and center.

“It’s so important that we show people we’re here for the members,” Tim says. “We’re going to be here a long time and we’re not just supplying electricity. We’re here for the community and we’re always going to be here in terms of support.”

For more information on Co-ops In Action visit www.maconelectric.com/coops-in-action or call the co-op at 660-385-3157.

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Charlie prides himself on the work that goes into his food even before you place your order. He says originally he looked at having some products brought into the restaurant, but the quality just wasn’t what he wanted. “I found myself trying to doctor it up to what I wanted it to be,” he says. “So we just decided to make that stuff on our own. I didn’t want to count on someone else to bring me an inferior product when I can make it the way we want it.”

Items such as their ranch dressing, southwest and house barbecue sauces are all freshly made. Charlie found the perfect pickle to make their hand-battered and deep-fried pickles. Smoked meats are a constant on The Heist’s menu, and all of that gets done in a small smoker behind the restaurant. Charlie uses hickory and cherry for smoked chicken and pulled pork that is used in the sandwiches and wraps.

For a unique start to your meal, order the Cannon Balls. Bite-size pieces of fresh-cut chicken are paired with slices of jalapeno, onion and Swiss cheese. The whole thing is wrapped in a slice of hickory-smoked bacon and takes a swim in a deep-fryer. It’s served with housemade jalapeno ranch.

“It’s kind of our version of a boneless chicken wing,” Charlie says. “The jalapenos are cooked so it mellows it out a little bit and balances with the cheese and hickory flavor from the bacon.”

The popular appetizer is named after the cannonball that is embedded in a column at the Lafayette County Courthouse. The cannonball has been there since a Civil War battle in the town five years before Jesse James robbed the bank.

If you’re in the mood for a wrap, you’ll have plenty from which to choose. The popular Southwest Chicken Wrap features house-smoked and shredded chicken, bacon, onion ring, lettuce, shredded cheese, tomato and the house southwest sauce, which Charlie describes as more of a spicy mustard. That smoked chicken also is used in the Chicken Que Wrap along with Swiss American cheese, barbecue sauce and pineapple chunks. The wrap is grilled before hitting your table.

Sandwiches are the star of the show here. The Reuben is a favorite among Lexingtonians, but if you’re hungry, opt for The 1866, named for the year of James’ heist. The sandwich is a Reuben-Philly cheesesteak mashup. Corned beef and finely sliced sirloin are cooked on the flattop along with sauerkraut. The meat and kraut are placed between slices of toasted marble rye with Swiss cheese and a generous portion of Thousand Island dressing.

“It’s really a huge sandwich,” Charlie says. “It’s like a Reuben on steroids, so good.”

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​Bev McCulloch rebuilds 1829 log cabin

When Benjamin Fry built his log cabin south of the town that would one day become Plattsburg, northwest Missouri looked a little different. In 1829, the cabin was on Missouri’s frontier. The Platte Purchase had not been made, Kansas City was not incorporated as a town and Smithville Lake was more than a century away from existing. But today Fry’s cabin looks much the same as it did almost 200 years ago, thanks to a retired music teacher who couldn’t let a piece of history be forgotten.

The cabin, which in 1991 was part of a barn across the road from where Bev and her late husband, Ron, lived, was due to be dismantled. “I thought maybe I’d try to save it, but the only thing I’d ever built was a doghouse,” recalls Bev, a Platte-Clay Electric Cooperative member.

Saving Fry’s cabin took Bev a little more effort than tacking together Fido’s abode. Pressed for time, she paid the cabin’s owner $100, and with the help of friends, family, neighbors, some chains and a pickup, Bev transported the cabin one log and foundation rock at a time to their farm. For the next three years, on a hillside in the woods, Fry’s cabin — now known as McCulloch’s Deer Creek Cabin — was rebuilt.

“For the longest time we were just trying to get it up,” Bev says. “The flood of ’93 hit and you couldn’t get a tractor or a truck in here. But everybody was safe and nobody got hurt. That was my goal.”

Bev had the foresight to label the logs before dismantling the structure. Wrangling the 200-year-old oak and walnut timbers, some weighing as much as a half a ton, took some ingenuity: With an iron bar and rocks, Bev managed to raise them on to a ramp built from other trees on the property, and hoisted each piece into position using a tractor and cable. She added windows to the west wall, and learned to chink the spaces between the logs using a mix of water and homemade plaster. With no way to raise the last three logs high enough, Bev stopped at the sixth level and built a loft and roof.

“I learned a lot of skills. When you do your rafters you have to cut what’s called a ‘bird’s mouth’ — just a 90-degree chunk — out of it, then it will lay flat on the plate.” She points out a conspicuously newer looking piece of the roof. “The ridge crown was the hardest thing because I had to splice it and had to lift it with help.”

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John Hess explores Brawley Creek

Every day of every season, there’s a play unfolding on the banks of Brawley Creek in Johnson County. John Hess is there, camera in hand, watching the actors. Today he might have his eye on the Virginia bluebells, tomorrow a luna moth larva. The stage could be any backyard in rural Missouri and it’s exactly the sort of “perfectly ordinary paradise” John has been wandering, photographing and musing over for almost 40 years.

“Everything that I find here is ordinary and commonplace,” John says. “There’s nothing about this place that isn’t true a mile down the street or 20 miles that way. This paradise is everywhere.”

John, a biology professor emeritus from the University of Central Missouri and photographer, insists there’s nothing special about his little corner of the world. Yet in combining two of his talents, he shows exactly why it is special in his book “A Perfectly Ordinary Paradise: An Intimate View of Life on Brawley Creek.” Framed around 40 years of the four seasons on what John and his wife, Gina, refer to simply as Brawley Creek, the book covers the history of the area, its natural residents and how human custodians have changed it along the way. As he has done more than 2,000 times on his blog, John uses an image to follow his natural curiosity, and in doing so, give readers lessons on botany, ornithology, herpetology and even philosophy. 

“The image is valuable as a way of telling the story, but the story is more important to me than the image,” John says, adding with a laugh, “That makes me a crummy artist, but that’s where I am on that.”

But John’s photos reveal an artist’s eye. The sidelong glance of a Galapagos tortoise as it enters a pool of water in his first book, or, at Brawley Creek, the life of a young nuthatch from egg to fledgling flyer bring the viewer up close and personal to the natural world and invite them to linger there and learn.

Shortly after retiring in 2003, John and Gina traveled to the Galapagos Islands. The trip, more akin to a pilgrimage for a biologist and wildlife photographer, made its signature impression on John just as it cast a spell on Charles Darwin nearly 200 years earlier. Returning home and unable to find a book covering the subjects of the island they were interested in, Gina suggested that John write his own. The result, “The Galapagos: Exploring Darwin’s Tapestry,” uses the islands’ unique plant and animal life to showcase the behavior and adaptation of species. Now in its second printing, the book earned accolades from some of John’s late literary heroes Edward O. Wilson and Daniel Quinn.

That the subject of John’s next book was as far from the Galapagos as it could be may have come as a shock to some. To John, it was another “perfectly ordinary” decision. After all, he’d been immersed in his 30 acres of Johnson County for half of his life. 

“The Galapagos Islands are a world-class destination and people go there to see all these fantastic things, but it’s a desert island,” John says. “And this is absolutely nowhere. The two places couldn’t be farther apart, but this, biologically, is much richer and there’s so much more to understand.”

Roaming the creek banks, John points out the century-old eastern cottonwoods and Kentucky coffeetrees, the white oak that was a sapling during Lewis and Clark’s expedition and a pair of sycamores, dubbed “The Twins,” which grow from the stump of a long dead ancestor and mark the original streambed. Amidst four decades’ worth of photographs he’s taken are other ephemera, including a 20-year list that references when, among other visitors, his annual phoebe returns to her nest by the bridge.

“When you live in a place for 40 years, you know these things,” John says. “I had this really intense urge to put this all together because I’d never seen anyone do it. The photographs are the connection. Everybody likes a pretty picture.”

John says one doesn’t have to be a trained photographer or biologist to appreciate the beauty in their own backyard. As a spring evening settles in, the sounds of life on Brawley Creek take on the decidedly dulcid tones of a Missouri frog pond. From the vantage point of John and Gina’s porch, close your eyes and you could be anywhere — a fine place to be. 

“Everybody has access to this,” John says, “all they need to do is look at it and think a little bit about how it lives its life.”

    John’s blog can be visited at pixlist.wordpress.com. A “Perfectly Ordinary Paradise: An Intimate View of Life on Brawley Creek” is available from the author and the University of Missouri Press. For more information visit www.brawleycreek.com, email john@brawleycreek.com or call 660-429-6483.

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Mother’s Day is a special time of year around the Jones household.

Most years it involves me scrambling around the house trying to find the gift I bought the month before, finding a way to sneak my kids away from Mom so they can make homemade cards, last-minute phone calls to restaurants that are all overbooked and usually ending with a low-key Mother’s Day celebration at our favorite neighborhood Mexican restaurant.

Somehow through all of this my wife, Lindsey, manages to show appreciation with style and grace.

I have looked high and low and have yet to find a manual out there with instructions on how to be a good mother. Sure, there’s plenty of stuff about childbirth, potty training and first aid for those mothers of little boys. But no one really prepares them for being the bearer of rocks and feathers that your child insists on bringing home, removing permanent marker ink off of a dog (or a little brother) or trying to find a tree frog that somehow has gotten loose in the house.

It takes a pretty special person to be a mom. I still to this day haven’t figured out how Lindsey manages to keep our house from burning down, makes sure our kids are fed and still finds time to look amazing.

There’s no special prize for raising a family. Nobody comes to the door when your kids turn 18 with a check, balloons and a banner reading: “You did it.” It’s a lifetime commitment that rewards you a little bit at a time — eventually resulting in turning that little baby boy or girl into an amazing man or woman.

Mother’s Day makes me think of our electric co-ops and how they were “born.” Someone had to coax them into life, and often it was just one person trying to get their friends and neighbors to put $5 down to get one light bulb, refrigerator or dairy cow milker to run off of electricity. Others took the co-op through its awkward teenage stage. Through years of nurturing and growing, our cooperatives are now “adults” every member-owner should be proud of.

I lost my mom when I was just a boy, but I know she would be proud of the man I have become, just like Lindsey is going to be proud of Max and Charlie and just like your co-ops are proud to see every single member succeed.

This Mother’s Day, let’s thank our mothers. The pay may not be so great … but the benefits are amazing.

Caleb is the executive vice president and CEO of the Association of Missouri Electric Cooperatives and a member of Boone Electric Cooperative.

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A typical day at the dairy includes collecting the milk from the dairy farms, then pasteurizing and preparing it to make cheese or bottle for sale.

Today, cheese curds and hand bottling milk is on the schedule. For the cheese curd process, milk is poured into a large stainless steel vat, with enzymes added and slowly heated to get the pH levels correct for the cheese. After the machines stir for hours, curds begin to form as they separate from the liquid. Once most of the liquid is gone, Kelli and the staff squeeze excess liquid out, then slice the solid mass of cheese into large slabs.

The cheese is then stacked in the stainless steel vat so any remaining liquid continues to drain. When ready, the slabs are run through a curd slicer. As the curds cure, dairy workers toss them to make sure they’re salted evenly. Then the curds are weighed and packed into stainless steel, cheesecloth lined forms and hand packed and pressed overnight. Then they’re ready for vacuum sealing and labeling.

One main distinction with Edgewood Creamery’s milk is that it isn’t homogenized like most milks consumers can purchase at the store. It’s also hand bottled.

Homogenization is the step after pasteurization when the fat is blown up into a smaller size and stays suspended in the milk. Edgewood Creamery’s milk is made with a minimal amount of processing, allowing them to offer a healthier nonhomogenized milk.

Another thing which makes Edgewood Creamery’s dairy varieties unique are the type of cows they use to make their milk and cheese. Part of the dairy cows they milk offer A2A2 genetics. This choice makes the creamery currently one of the only ones in the region to offer A2A2 milk in addition to regular milk.

“Some of the cows we milk have been genetically tested to make sure they have only these proteins in them,” says Kelli, then quickly follows with, “You’ve heard of heirloom seeds? A2A2 cows are heirloom cows.”

The A2A2 milk is a game changer for those people who are lactose intolerant. The milk is collected in separate bulk tanks to make sure there isn’t cross-contamination.

“There’s actually not a lot more money in this for us, but we want to look out for our end customer. This is one more option we can offer to those who might not have been able to enjoy dairy before,” says Kelli.

According to the dairy owner, you won’t taste any difference between regular and A2A2 milk. But she does say Edgewood’s milk tastes sweeter and creamier than most because the cows are grass fed and the milk is vat pasteurized. Kelli says it doesn’t cause inflammation for most people because it closely mimics mother’s milk.

“It’s pretty amazing when someone starts to cry when they tell you that they’ve never been able to enjoy milk before they tried our A2A2 line,” Kelli says of their products, which are part of the Buy Missouri program.

There are plans to expand the creamery in the future and add items such as bottling machines and possibly offering heavy cream and butter. But for now, Kelli and her nine employees are churning out the milk and cheese as fast as possible.

“We’re processing about 2,000 gallons of milk alone each week,” says Kelli. “That’s a lot when you’re doing it by hand.”

Customers can purchase Edgewood Creamery milk and cheese at Hy-Vee, Price Cutter and Mama Jean’s Natural Market and Deli in Springfield. You’re also welcome to stop by the creamery’s small storefront, if you happen to be out in their area during the day. There you’ll also be able to purchase locally grown beef raised on nearby Five Holler Farm, owned by her sister and brother-in-law, Kegan and Mark Terry.

“We’re really just harvesting sunshine, which makes the grass grow, which the cows eat,” says Kelli. “And that quality goes into althe products we make here at Edgewood Creamery.”

To contact Edgewood Creamery, call 417-442-3010 or email sales@edgewoodcreamery.com; www.edgewoodcreamery.com. The creamery is located at 5888 Farm Road 1090 in Purdy. Small group tours are available when booked in advance. This is one of nearly 500 Missouri companies that are part of the Buy Missouri initiative overseen by Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe. To find Missouri-made products or to enroll your business visit www.BuyMissouri.net.

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