Judge Cudahy’s Second Alamo Article
Steve Mitnick is president of Lines Up, Inc., Executive Editor of Public Utilities Fortnightly, and author of Lewis Latimer, The First Hidden Figure and Lines Down, How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.
Many of us that have followed the mess in Texas have seen mention of a so-called midnight connection that long ago attempted but failed to reunite the Lone Star State's grid with the grids of the United States. Amid the many calls for there to be another attempt at such a connection, at the midnight hour or at any other time of the day or night, it's instructive to review the last try at sanity and why it nearly drove everyone involved to insanity.
Reviewing the weird events of the fourth of May 1976, forty-five years ago, and the convoluted circumstances leading up to them, and the labyrinthine confrontations afterward, isn't easy to do. Why is that? Because the definitive text on this tortuous tale is inaccessible to all but the most ambitious researchers.
The tale is told in the aptly-named article, "The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection." It was written by the widely-respected jurist, Richard Dickson Cudahy, when he was the senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit. But this dense discourse was published in an American Bar Association journal that is difficult to get your hands on and even if you do, is laborious to go through.