Following its by-laws, the young telephone cooperative had seven directors: Gilbert Sellers was president, Ben Spear was vice-president, and Mildred Smith was secretary/treasurer, with the remaining board members being Farley Bright, Fred Conners, Morris Turnipseed, and Guy Peugh . Once its organizational structure was in place, application was made in 1952 to the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) for the loan. The loan application was approved. However, the REA required that there be at least 210 sign-ups—customers—to release the funds to the co-op. Signing on as a customer required a $50 membership fee, quite a sum of money in 1952.

The required sign-ups were obtained within a year, and construction began on the original building in 1953. When it was finished, it served as business office, manager’s office, switchboard, and warehouse. Today, it is used as the Central Office equipment building. The original loan amount was $223,000. Of this amount, $123,000 went to the construction of the outside plant—an average cost of about $1,000 per mile—with the remainder going toward construction of the building and telephone equipment.

The initial outside plant consisted of 121 route miles of aerial lead cable and open wire from the edge of town to subscriber homes. These lines had to be “walked” in order to inspect them, and this had to be done often. Three central office substations were located in Ramer, Lapine, and Pine Level. Each office was equipped with 100 customer lines. The first day of operation the company had 171 official subscribers. Not all of the original 210 signed on for service, most likely because of the $50 membership fee.

The original service included 8-party lines for $3.50 a month, 4-party lines for $4.25 a month, and a one-party line for $5 a month, with an additional 10 % excise tax. On October 29, 1954, the phones were “cut over”—put into operation—and the first phone bills went out on November 1, 1954 . The company would continue to offer 8-party lines (which occasionally turned into 9-party lines) until the 1970s. The 4-party lines remained until 1987-1988 when Mon•Cre installed T carriers and the first digital switchboard in Pine Level.

Expansion began almost immediately—within two years of opening. By 1960, the number of subscribers had increased to 600. The first major construction/renovation was the switchboard swap-over in 1962-1963. Telephone co-ops could expand their services by applying to the REA for funds for particular projects, which were reviewed by the organization, and if approved, funds were held until the work was completed and inspected by REA officials.

E.L. Coates was the manager during the start-up year. H.R. Duke followed for a two-year period. In 1960, Baxter Collier recruited Larry Menefee as general manager. Mr. Menefee left a job with a farm supply company, a Purina dealer, in Troy to become general manager in September 1960. “I had no telephone experience,” Mr. Menefee recalls, “but Baxter Collier knew I was willing to work.” And work he did—for 38 years. For 36 of those years he worked alongside his wife, Betty, who had come to work for Mon•Cre in July 1954 from the Union Bank of Montgomery. Mrs. Menefee, who worked for 44 years for Mon•Cre, was recruited by none other than Mildred Smith.

By her own admission, Mrs. Menefee did “every job in the house”: single-handedly processing phone bills, transcribing notes that were kept on the calls that were made, with costs and tax added by hand, and then typed on a manual typewriter; operating the switchboard; and even scrubbing the floors. “If something needed to be done,” she says, “I did it.” Switchboard operators in the early days were called upon for many things, from telephone numbers to recipes to what the weather was going to be, as well as information about accidents, deaths, and other news stories.

She stepped in for a short time and assisted the president of the co-op’s board, C.E. Sellers, with management of the company when it was without a general manager in the the arrival of her husband, Larry, as general manager. Miss Mildred Smith herself, in one of her Alabama Journal Closeup columns, said that Betty Menefee “has literally grown up with the system and knows it from ‘pillar to post.’”

As they look back, both Menefees recall that it was sometimes a struggle to keep the company going in those early years. For a number of years, when Mr. Menefee came to Mon•Cre, the co-op had only five or six employees; by the time he retired, there were 18 in the phone company and several in the TV/Wireless division.

In the early days, Mr. Menefee says, people didn’t know the difference between management and outside workers. They were both, usually, side by side, on work details. He recalls one incident vividly. “We were working on a repair project one afternoon in the China Grove area where the water department had cut a cable. Early the next morning, I was in the hole splicing the cable back together when a man walked up from his home with a cup of coffee and started talking to me. He said that he was going to call Larry Menefee and give him a piece of his mind. He was sick of being without telephone service.” Mr. Menefee looked at him and said, “You don’t have to call. You just did.” Both Betty and Larry Menefee look back fondly, and remember, “What customers wanted most was perfect service and no bill!”

Mon•Cre’s Gary Lumley would agree that Mr. Menefee’s recollections of managers and employees working side by side are right on the money: “He never asked you to do anything he wouldn’t do. He was usually in the hole first.” Not only was Mr. Menefee a dedicated general manager and supervisor, he also had good instincts about his communities’ needs and a great business sense.

During an NTCA convention in New Orleans in 1995, Menefee saw a display for satellite TV, just prior to the national launch of satellite TV. NTCA members were offered the option to buy either cable or non-cable rights exclusively for their areas. He presented the board with the information; it would cost Mon•Cre $200,000 to get on board. The board was reluctant to invest the money. However, TV reception in the area was poor, and Mr. Menefee and the board knew the market for satellite was definitely there. They bought the rights to Pike, Crenshaw, Montgomery, and Bullock counties. Once the satellite was launched, Mon•Cre began to offer service in 1996-1997 through a subsidiary venture of Mon•Cre Telephone, Mon•Cre TV, which later changed to Mon•Cre Wireless.