Fannin County
Electric Cooperative, Inc.
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Fannin County
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Farmers always hoped they would some day find a hired hand who would never tire, always be there, and always be ready for work. Well, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association supplied them with Willie Wiredhand, the tireless hired hand who never goofs off. Willie has been a long time fixture of the NRECA's programs.
In 1951, Willie was chosen by NRECA members to serve as their national symbol of rural electrification. Investor-owned electric utilities at first claimed Willie Wiredhand was just a copy of their mascot, Reddy Kilowatt. A legal dispute ended on January 7, 1957, when the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of a lower court allowing NRECA the use of Willie Wiredhand. Today, Willie Wiredhand is used in a variety of ways as a personification of rural electrification, and has been copyrighted and registered. On January 16, 1973 NRECA secured the patent for instant recognition/common identification program featuring Willie Wiredhand. Today Willie serves hundreds of member systems across the Nation. He appears everywhere in headquarters buildings, substations, billboards, signs, letterheads, annual reports, newspapers, and in a great variety of printed matter. In fact, Willie appears too on novelties, jewelry, and various promotional items, which is monitored by NRECA's National Identification Services program.
Willie Wiredhand is widely used because it has come to represent--at a glance--a vast and somewhat complex program. Willie not only represents rural electrification in the abstract, but also all the ways in which farmers and other rural people can put electricity to use in their work and in their leisure.
Willie is a celebrity in the United States and has become international. Many Latin American countries, through the NRECA-AID program, are using Willie as their symbol of rural electrification--further proof that he is right on the job.
