You can’t keep them away
Some members came carrying decades of memories. One brought his grandfather’s membership certificate. All arrived knowing this meeting was theirs.
By the time the band launched into Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again,” no one at Sayre City Park needed warming up.
The temperature had climbed past 100 degrees on this Saturday in August. Children shrieked as they hit the water in the city pool. Across the street, families braved the full sun for a round of miniature golf. Under the shade tents, neighbors ate barbecue, browsed booths filled with homemade goods and settled into the easy conversation of people accustomed to seeing one another across feed-store counters, church pews and fence lines.
And right up front, parked near the band, was Roger Parr. 
Parr is usually the first member to arrive at Northfork Electric Cooperative’s (NFEC) annual meeting. In roughly 20 years, he has missed only one.
His attendance record has been better than his luck at the prize drawings. He has won one major prize in all those years: a laptop. The memory still makes him laugh. He is not much of a computer guy.
This year, the grand prize was a John Deere zero-turn mower. Members also went home with buckets with helpful household odds and ends. But Parr comes back for something that cannot be loaded into a pickup.
“My cooperative is not a business. It’s a family,” he said. “They are always nice to me and treat me good.”
Annual meetings across Oklahoma take different forms. Some electric cooperatives have adopted drive-thru events, responding to members who value convenience and accessibility. That willingness to listen is part of being a cooperative. 
At NFEC, the community-style gathering remains something members value. The annual meeting feels part business meeting, part reunion and part hometown festival. Its importance can be measured in the members who arrange their day around it and the family stories that follow them through the gate.
A day worth stopping for
By 9:19 a.m., NFEC had what it needed to conduct business for its 87th annual meeting.
Registration had opened just 19 minutes earlier, but the cooperative had already reached a quorum with 165 people on hand. The NFEC staff moved like a well-oiled machine, moving seamlessly between tasks all while making members feel welcome.
NFEC CEO Brent Meador was everywhere.
He greeted members as they drove up, handed out water from steel bins and spoke with as many people as he could. When it was time to give his report, he stepped to the front. When it was time to work another part of the event, he went there.
“We’ll do this as long as the members want us to,” Meador said. “We’re here to serve them.” 
When someone calls the cooperative with a complaint, that person may speak directly with Meador. Sometimes, the CEO shows up at the member’s home.
“Most of the time they are surprised to see me there,” Meador said. “But I want them to know they matter and we are going to work together to find a solution.”
That responsibility also guides the people elected to serve on NFEC’s board.
NFEC trustee Chad Smith says his wife, Sherry, remembers attending annual meetings as a girl. Her mother loved the event. For their family, it marked one day when work on the farm could wait and the children could swim in the pool, which the cooperative opened to them for free.
Decades later, Smith is helping make decisions for the same cooperative.
Smith joined NFEC’s board of trustees in January 2022. When he speaks about the role, his voice catches. To him, board service is a responsibility entrusted to him by neighbors.
“I consider it a great honor to serve our co-op members,” Smith said. “Every decision we make as a board is informed by them.”
The boy who once waited for annual meeting day to jump into the pool grew into the trustee now responsible for helping safeguard the cooperative for the families gathering there.
One of those members brought another piece of NFEC history. Wearing overalls like a Saturday uniform, Kevin Kennemer sat under a shaded tent, eating barbecue and shooting the breeze with a high school classmate. 
He had also brought along a certificate he found among his family’s belongings. It documented his grandfather’s NFEC membership beginning in the 1940s.
“I knew someone up here would care about seeing that,” he said.
He was right.
Still showing up
Few people embody that devotion better than Laverne Tucker.
A Sweetwater native, Tucker arrived with snowy white hair, neat-as-a-pin clothes and a sharp wit. She has stories from a life that stretches back to World War II, when she helped prepare bombs for the war effort. Strength and determination still come naturally to her.
Since 2018, when she was 96, Tucker has claimed the annual meeting prize recognizing NFEC’s oldest member. This year, she accepted a $50 gift certificate.
“You can’t keep me away from this meeting,” she said. 
Around her, children raced toward the pool. Adults lingered over lunch. Music drifted across the park while vendors visited with shoppers. The generations mingled without ceremony, from members carrying memories of the cooperative’s earliest decades to children building their own memories one cannonball at a time.
Membership looks like Parr arriving before everyone else. It is Tucker showing up and defending her title. It is Smith remembering the one day his family stopped farmwork to spend time together. It is Kennemer carrying his grandfather’s certificate to the meeting because he knew someone would care.
As the gathering wound down, an ice cream truck offered some welcome relief from the heat and sent families home smiling. The mower went home with one lucky member. Buckets left with many more.
Parr had not come for any of them.
He had arrived early, settled near the band and spent another August Saturday among people he considers family. Next year, if history is any indication, he will be one of the first through the gate again.
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