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Career gives light to an evolving Florida

In nearly four decades with an electric company, a journeyman lineman had a hand in creating the new suburban landscape.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published November 27, 2005

	[Times photo: Brendan Fitterer]
	Marion Conder shares some of the memories from his 38 years with the Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative recently at the cooperative's Bayonet Point office. Conder started working for the utility in 1967, putting up poles around Pasco County. He will retire from his current journeyman lineman job in January.

Marion Conder connects electricity to the kinds of houses that continue to change the state in which he has lived for almost the past half century.

Conder has worked for the Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative for 38 years, and that makes him the company's senior lineman and the fifth-most-senior employee overall. He is set to retire at the end of January. He is also one of the few remaining, dwindling links, at Withlacoochee, or anywhere, for that matter, to a totally different Florida in a completely different time.

When he started working for the Dade City company on Oct. 15, 1967, he put up the poles that ran light to the Pasco County dark spots that are now so many tight-laid, suburban subdivisions.

Last week, in Heritage Pines off County Line Road, he had to dig a ditch to put in a pipe to run electricity to a big new house. He backed up a Bobcat backhoe, and he did it slowly and with skill.

"I don't want to make no bigger hole than I have to," he said.

He turned off the motor. It got quiet. The wind blew.

Way back in the beginning, lunch on the job usually meant saltines, sardines and beanie weenies under the shade of a thick, tall tree. Not anymore.

"Now new houses are easier to find than an oak tree to eat lunch under," he said.

Conder is 62. He wears brown Rocky-brand boots, dark denim dungarees and a light-blue work shirt with his name printed in script. He has no teeth and a beard that is white and rough, and his hands are man's hands.

He is a journeyman lineman, the highest rank, and sometimes he still goes up in a bucket truck, but mostly these days he does the connections that can't be seen above ground.

The company has young guys work with him.

"The old man's still got it," district manager Bob Arnett said earlier in the week at Withlacoochee's Bayonet Point office at U.S. 19 and State Road 52.

Conder grew up in Springfield, Ky., where his dad hauled livestock and had a general store. His parents moved to Port Richey in '61. He has been here ever since.

He worked on a shrimp boat for six years. The boat went 4 or 5 miles out into the gulf and ran from the coast of Pasco all the way up to Yankeetown. He had a blue '62 Corvette that was good on U.S. 19 when there were no traffic lights from Weeki Wachee to Dunedin.

Then he came to Withlacoochee.

He started at $1.45 an hour. Every two weeks he got a check for $86.47. Raises came in nickels and dimes.

For the first three years, he lived with his wife, Rose, in an apartment upstairs from the old Bayonet Point office. Rent was free as long as he answered the company phone on nights and weekends.

The district had 8,000 customers then.

Now there are 57,000.

On his first day, when Withlacoochee territory started at a hog farm in northern Pinellas County and Pasco's Ridge and Little roads were made of dirt, Conder went out on a digger truck and started sticking poles in the ground.

The company was in a race with Florida Power Corp.

"There was a time when crews worked 24 hours to build lines to a customer to claim a territory," said Ernie Holzhauer, Withlacoochee's manager of member relations. "That is honestly the way it was."

And not all that long ago.

A generation and change, Florida time.

The length of the career of Marion Conder.

Once, in the early '70s, he saw a monkey hollering on the top of a power pole with an arm "blowed off" from touching a transformer. "There was monkeys all over Tarpon back then," he said.

He has had two friends die of electrocution.

He has had a heart attack, that was five years ago, and now he has a stent in there.

He has worked the aftermath of who knows how many hurricanes, including, of course, the four that raked the state in the summer of 2004.

But Conder never really thought about doing anything else.

"It was close to home," he said. "We had food.

"I don't move much.

"I stay in one place."

He figures everything else is doing more than enough moving anyway.

He lives in a small house on the Pithlachascotee River that he paid $8,000 for 35 years ago. It has two bedrooms, a bath and a half, a living room, a kitchen, a back porch, and wood floors.

He has two boats. He fishes for grouper and snook and he knows the rocks where they hide.

He will turn 63 on Jan. 5.

The roughly 700 unused hours of sick leave he has will keep him on Withlacoochee health insurance for three years after he retires.

Come January, when he leaves, he's going to keep his house on the Cotee River, he said, and then spend at least several months and maybe even half the year on the 80 acres he has in Springfield. The land has deer and turkey and rabbits and squirrels. There's catfish in the river in back.

His boy lives in Louisville, Ky. His boy now has boys of his own. He'll spend some time with them.

Earlier last week, though, he drove a Withlacoochee truck into Heritage Pines, past the guard at the gatehouse, past the construction-company pickup trucks and the cabinet-company vans, then around onto Scenic Hills Drive, where the ground is flat and most all of the houses are beige or gray.

The yard of the house where they had to work was covered with sod. Conder and his 29-year-old partner named Eddy Falco had to pick up the square-shaped pieces.

Falco used a shovel.

Conder used his hands.

It came up easy.

"They just put it down," he said. "Probably yesterday."

Marion Conder got into the Bobcat cab and backed it up over the low curb and the clean concrete sidewalk. He had both hands on joysticks and started digging a ditch. He made the hoe go down into the ground, through the wet, smooth sand, down to where the dirt gets dark and deep.

--Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified November 27, 2005, 01:18:21]