Employees and families celebrate history during Tecumseh Energy's

By JENNIFER KNOPP

The Capital-Journal

TECUMSEH --- Nostalgia, not electricity, was generated Thursday afternoon by employees and their families at the 75th anniversary celebration for the Tecumseh Energy Center.

Hosted in the old energy center building amid antique voltage detectors and generators, the ceremony brought together the faces of past and present.

The center began its operations October 6, 1925, and had the first turbo generator with a 6,000 kilowatt capacity.

Just a year before, the Kansas Power and Light Co. was created.

The plant was destroyed by fire in December 1948, and rebuilt in the spring of 1950.

Mike Brouhard, senior director for the Tecumseh Energy Center, and Dave Wittig, Western Resources' chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer, expressed their thanks at the ceremony to the center's employees for their dedication to the plant and its continued success.

One former employee, Mike Funston, worked in the original building during the late 1940s and said he was surprised to see all of the boilers and generators he helped to install were removed.

Funston worked as a plant engineer and said it was his first job out of college.

Ron Ward, instrument control technician, has worked at the energy center for eight years, and said when he first arrived, the plant began removing the last five or six turbine generators from the old plant building.

Funston said the plant used the original building until 1981 when the company started automating everything and expanding into newer buildings.

The plant turned the original building into a storage area.

He said during the past four years most plant operations have become computerized.

"We lost a lot of people because of it," he said.

Another employee, Greg Hylton, said the plant has been in operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 75 years without a hitch.

Hylton said there was always someone to contact if there was trouble at the plant.

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