Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

In tribute: Longtime ag instructor 'born to be a teacher'

CLOVIS — Jim Turnbough liked to fish when he had the spare time. He also liked to go square dancing when he had the time.

But most of Turnbough’s time went to what friends and family said he was born to do, teach agriculture.

Turnbough, who died April 21 at age 87, spent 30 years teaching agriculture and the FFA mantra — learning to do, doing to learn, learning to live, living to serve.

“Jim was born to be a teacher,” said Betty Turnbough, who spent 35 years as his wife after the two reconnected at a Rogers High School reunion. “He’s had awards all over the country for agriculture education. That man was born to teach young people.”

Born March 16, 1934, in Elida, Turnbough got his start in agriculture early. He was active on the Rogers High School FFA team, where he served as president and had two grand champion animals at the New Mexico State Fair.

After his 1953 graduation from Rogers, Turnbough earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree at New Mexico State University. Aside from his first two years of teaching building the agriculture program at Animas, Turnbough spent the rest of his teaching career at Clovis.

Turnbough never had children of his own, but took interest in the nearly 1,200 children he taught and encouraged to do some type of animal, crop or shop project over the years.

Nephew John Meador, a 1973 CHS graduate, said shop classes were something he and other students always looked forward to, even though he joked Uncle Jim was a little tougher on him than his classmates. Even though he never went into agriculture, instead becoming a railroad engineer, there was plenty he took from those classes.

“I think he helped all of us,” Meador said. “We had an hour (in the) classroom, and then we had an hour of shop. We got introduced to the basics of electricity. We had to overhaul a lawn mower engine. We learned woodworking; we had to build a project out of wood. We had to weld, and we had to use the torch.

“We weren’t masters of anything, but you did learn the proper way to use it. We could basically build or do almost anything you wanted to in shop class.”

By day, he ran the vocational agriculture and FFA departments; by night, he taught night welding classes to the New Mexico Carpenters Union.

Turnbough’s mark on local agriculture is undeniable, from helping start the New Mexico State Fair’s farm mechanics contest to helping lay the groundwork for what is now the Curry County Junior Livestock Sale.

Countless students under Turnbough’s tutelage took state and national awards in FFA competitions, and Turnbough was the inaugural recipient of the New Mexico Vocational Agriculture Teacher of the Year award in 1971.

His service went beyond the classroom, including time on the Curry County Fair Board, Clovis Rotary Club, the New Mexico FFA boards of governors and trustees, the Governor’s Interagency Public Advisory Council for Children and Youth and the State Agriculture Education Textbook Committee.