James Turner Research Paper

1056 Words3 Pages

James Turner was born on July 20, 1940, in Clinton, South Carolina, a small town about 25 miles south of Greenwood, where James and his wife, Vickie, currently live. His father worked in a textile factory as a machine operator, and his mother, for the most part, was a homemaker. When I asked James if he knew the origin of his last name, he said he never had any interest in looking into it. To his recollection, his great-great-grandmother on his father’s side was a Cherokee Indian, but the Turner last name is a common name originating in England, dating back as far as the 12th century. “They say if you shake the tree long enough, a monkey will fall out,” says James. Growing up with an older brother and a younger sister, James recalls neither …show more content…

“I went to Academy Street Grammar School and graduated from Clinton High School. We weren’t rich, but we were happy. Good thing about those days was that we never knew we were poor,” reflects James. Just like his father, James had animals since his early childhood. Although he doesn’t remember why he wanted pigeons at the age of six, he remembers several people in the neighborhood having barn pigeons. James’ father built his first pigeon box, which could hold only two pairs of birds, when James was six years old. Back then, they fed their pigeons with scratch feed that consisted of wheat, milo, and corn. Up until he joined the military, James had common barn pigeons and some show breeds, but the first purebred pigeons he owned were a pair of Carneaus. James remembers how expensive his first purebred pigeons were and how far his dad and he traveled to get them. “We drove seventeen miles and paid $4 for a pair of red Carneaus,” says James, indicating it was a big deal back then. Only when James was in the military or when he relocated did he not have pigeons; otherwise, he clearly remembers breeding pigeons since he was six years …show more content…

He wondered why Rollers did not come with all of the colors that he saw in his other fancy pigeons. He wondered why he couldn’t have pretty colored birds that also rolled well. He had no genetic books to read or anyone to talk to about his ideas and questions, but he started to wonder about why only certain breeds of pigeons were able to produce different colors. When I asked James if that was his first genetic project, he said, “Color-wise, it was that recessive yellow, but I didn’t have much success with it. I tried to reproduce more of those recessive yellows, but I didn’t know exactly how to do that at the time. In all honesty, I don’t remember my first serious color project in Rollers either because I was always interested in genetics and breeding things. Now, you have to realize nobody taught me any genetics, and I didn’t read any genetic books when I started fooling around with genetics, but every time I got a strange-looking pigeon, I tried to reproduce it. I didn’t always understand what genes and chromosomes were, but from my breeding experiments, I could figure out how to get what I wanted,” says James, indicating pigeon breeders don’t have to know anything about genetics to produce the desired traits or champion performers. According to James, the really good breeders, even if they don’t know any genetics, can still keep good pedigree so that they know the ancestry of their birds. To

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