Sweet Life: Frank Burns

The farthest north Frank Burns ever moved was five miles from where he was born off of Stuart Place Road on January 27, 1929.
He and his eight siblings moved to Primera in 1935. He was the sixth of eight children, five boys and three girls. Burns, a brother and a sister in Houston survive.
“I went to first grade here at Wilson School,” Burns said while sitting in a brown chair next to a window that looked out onto a field of sugar cane, the crop he grows.
Burns just retired after serving on Magic Valley Electric Cooperative’s board of directors for 42 years. He is a farmer.
His wife, Wilma, graduated high school in 1946, a year before he did.
“She graduated a year before me. She got smarter than I did. I don’t need to tell anybody that,” he said. “I laid out one year during the war because dad got hung up and needed help on one of the Pepsi Cola trucks. My dad worked at Pepsi Cola, and after that I thought I ought to go and finish school.”
The couple married on April 16, 1948, and their 64th wedding anniversary is fast approaching.
While his older brothers served in World War II, Burns had just turned 18 in 1947, the year the draft ended.
“They wouldn’t let me go overseas. I just became 18 when they quit the draft, and I was farming already,” he said.
Burns has grown everything from cabbage to corn and from grain to cotton, adapting as markets have changed. He just grows sugar cane now.
In 1969, Burns got a call from the Magic Valley Electric Cooperative. They wanted to know if he would join the board of directors.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know that much about electricity. But I will take the job,’” he said with a laugh. “And they said they’d tell me all I needed to know.”
Burns stayed on the board for 42 years, doing more reading than, he said, a person could do, as well as attending meetings twice a month.
MVEC employs 235 people and serves Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Willacy and Kenedy counties. It was founded in 1937 and has nearly 5,000 miles of energized line, 1,000 of which are underground.
In those 42 years, Burns missed one annual meeting. He’s served on the board longer than anyone else, and he’s known some of his colleagues longer than that.
But the man wasn’t all work.
When he wasn’t farming or going to board meetings, Burns spent time with his family and enjoyed hunting deer. He has one animal mounted in his house, the first buck he ever shot, an eight-point class. It’s in his garage.
His daughter-in-law, Lolly Burns, described his passion for deer hunting as habitual, commenting that the only year he didn’t have a deer lease resulted in the purchase of an 80-acre ranch.
Burns has been a church-going man his whole life, and just last week, four generations of his family went to church together.
In addition to serving on the MVEC’s board of directors, Burns spent 33 years on the board of directors of the La Feria Water District.
Frank and his wife, Wilma, have two sons, Keith and Richard.