I hit the ground in 1958 in a quaint little town named Taylor in the great state of Texas at John’s Hospital on main street. We lived in a little house just a block from the hospital on East Eighth Street.

After a divorce in ‘64, I was transferred to my grandmother’s home on Thompson, just down the street from First United Methodist, my current church home. There I traveled the neighborhood with my friends, learned to ride a bike, walked every day to school at Twelfth Street Elementary, which used to be just south of Memorial field, where I got to watch the Ducks on Friday nights. We played in the park, visited the zoo, (yes we had a zoo; I remember feeding the deer) I learned to swim at the old pool in Murphy Park. It was paradise. Just before my eighth birthday I moved across the world to Austin and finished school there. 

I was fortunate in being able to attend the new Anderson High School on Mesa Drive in Austin. In 1973 we had the first computer lab in the Austin ISD. Actually we didn’t have a computer, no one did; we had a small office with a teletype machine and two chairs, no monitors, just a dot matrix printer, and a phone connection to Tarus, a refrigerator size CDC6600 computer on the UT campus which we never actually saw in person. Our Basic and later Fortran programs were stored on punched paper tape.  Computer time was expensive, seems like we had 5 minutes of actual computation time for the entire year! Needless to say, there could be no endless loops. Some UT student had created a text based Star Trek game which we were allowed to play if we had computer time left over. Sometimes we would lock the door and spend the afternoon killing Romulans. It was an amazing time. I’ve been playing with computers ever since.

After graduating from Anderson High School in 1977, I came back to Taylor and took a position at the Sandow Power Station in Rockdale, shoveling coal and cleaning coal furnaces for a year. From there I transferred to the Electrical department as Unit 4 plant was coming on line and spent 10 years there. During that time I married, raised two boys, Matthew and Stephen, worked my way up to Senior I&C, Instrument and Control, tech. In 2000 I became a single dad with two children and had to learn some time management skills. Fortunately I had good neighbors in a quiet neighborhood and we made it work. It really does take a village.

In 2007 I married my best friend Lisa Stiles Drummond whom I met at First United Methodist Church and got a third son, Conoley. Along the way, I took classes at Temple College and received an Associates degree in General Studies, participated in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, band contests and watched a little Duck football. We had it all. It was and is the American dream. Around 2007 Luminent decided to expand the power station by building unit 5 a new 600 MW monster with two combined boilers and one turbine. A year later I transferred there as the lead tech and spent most of the next year in Rockdale and Pittsburgh coming home to eat and sleep occasionally. It was intense and stressful and I loved it and somehow we survived it. By 2010 I was burned out and decided to take early retirement. It was a good decision, I highly recommend it, although it doesn’t pay very well.

So today I garden, spend a little time in the woods, and help out at the local hardware store, Moss True Value. My wife, Lisa, works at the Lone Star Circle of Care Clinic on Mallard Lane as a Family Nurse Practitioner. I’m really proud of that lady; she is my best friend and anchor. We are still living the dream. Two of our children have homes here in Taylor, both in district 2. My oldest son and grandchildren are in Arkansas.

During my time here in Taylor, I have seen central Taylor go from a thriving community in the 60’s to a virtual ghost town in later years. Today, Taylor is on the rise; the community is vibrant, alive and growing. We have a thriving artist community, a local brewery, new music venues, new businesses and new parks. New housing additions popping up around town and families are arriving. It truly is an exciting time to be a citizen of Taylor.

So in January of 18 with the encouragement of my family and friends, I filed for the District 2 seat on the Taylor City Council and on May 5th won the election.

“We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win”.

JFK

Mitchell Drummond