11 minute read
Member Spotlight
Tom Samples Professional of the Year Frank Turner
General Manager, Tennessee Green Lawn and Landscape
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How did you get into the turfgrass industry?
I started when I was in high school, I took a job at a golf course in Hendersonville at Bluegrass Country Club. I’d played golf before, I enjoyed the game of golf, and it was just an opportunity for a summer job, so I took that after graduating high school.
My freshman year in college, I was planning to major in forestry. I noticed quite a few students in that program (this was the early 70s and I think everybody wanted to be in forestry), and it looked like the job market might not be that favorable after four years. I went and talked to the department head at UT and found out that they offered a program in turfgrass management, so I changed my major going into my sophomore year.
Dr. Lloyd Callahan was my advisor throughout my four years at UT, and I still remember speaking to him the very first time, asking him about job possibilities and what the program was like.
Mountaintop Golf & Lake Club, Cashiers, N.C. October 2015, Frank Turner, Roger Frazier, Jeff Rumph. Frank’s son, Brock Turner, was theAssistant GC Superintendent at the time.
How did you start actually working in the business?
Dr. Callahan was instrumental in pretty much all of the golf course jobs that I got after I graduated from UT, indirectly or directly. He had encouraged me to apply for a scholarship from the Georgia Golf Course Superintendents Association, which was the Charlie Danner Scholarship, and I was fortunate enough to receive that award. I received that scholarship award and was asked to apply for the position of assistant superintendent at Capitol City Country Club in Atlanta. I took that job, and I was there for about two-and-a-half years before moving back to Tennessee for a superintendent’s position at Graymere Country Club in Columbia, Tennessee.
I was in Columbia for about six years. In October of 1986, I took the superintendent’s job at Cherokee Country Club in Knoxville and was there from 1986 to 1998. I’m thankful that I was given an opportunity with the Litton Cochran family here in Knoxville to form, build and supervise a landscape department. They were owner-operators of 31 McDonald’s restaurants in and around Knoxville, and we worked exclusively for them and within their company, just maintaining their properties.
In October of 2018, Mr. Cochran decided to retire, and he sold a number of his stores, but still kept nine of them. I had to make a decision on what I was going to do next, because nine stores was not going to keep myself, and four men that work with me, busy 40 hours a week. Mr. Cochran and I talked it over and with his financial backing and his business and professional experience, we decided to form our own lawn and landscape company. We continue to maintain the nine stores that he still owns, and we have picked up additional commercial and residential accounts to build our business.
Frank Turner accepting the GCSAA Scholarship at the TTA conference in 1978.
How has the TTA grown and changed over the years that you’ve been involved?
I have some great, great memories of TTA conferences and the association going back all the way to January 1981, which was my first TTA conference as a superintendent. In those days, Dr. Callahan was primarily responsible for the program, and we always had a great program, but one thing that was different from today is that we would have a banquet on either Monday or Tuesday night of the conference. Everybody would come, you’d wear a coat and tie, they would have a social hour, an open bar that everybody enjoyed for the hour before the banquet. We got to spend time with each other, and then we’d have the banquet.
There’d be a few awards, usually just a scholarship to a student, they would announce the new board of directors, the new officers at the time. We also had entertainment after the banquet. There was one year there was a magician, one year there was a comedian. We had some country music and bluegrass performers come and entertain us. It was always interesting and exciting to see who was going to be the entertainment for the night. Another thing that was interesting or different was that the major companies would have a hospitality suite somewhere in the hotel. In those days we were in the Roadway Inn, down on Briley Parkway. On one of the upper floors, some of these companies would have hospitality suites and instead of going out to eat dinner, which we do now a lot of times, everybody would just jump on the elevator and go up to the sixth floor or wherever the suite was, and they would have plenty of stuff to eat and drink and there would be people standing out in the halls, the doors would be wide open and we’d just have a great time at those hospitality suites. There might even be a card game going on in one of the other rooms. Everybody stayed right there, and it was just a great time.
What would you say is the biggest change in the industry from the time you started managing turfgrass until now?
Certainly that when I was first getting into the industry, most of the courses in the south at that time probably had bermudagrass greens and they were slowly converting to bentgrass greens, because at the time bentgrass was a superior putting surface. Now we’ve gone almost a full 360 and we’re seeing more courses go back to bermudagrass greens because they’ve improved the varieties. There’s ultradwarf varieties that have great putting qualities and so we’re seeing a change because again even this transition zone where it’s difficult to grow cool season grasses in the summertime, it’s difficult sometimes to maintain warm season grasses in the wintertime, so it’s certainly a difficult place to grow grass.
I guess you’d say that how the grasses have evolved, how the industry has found new products to help manage these different grasses, that’s the change that I notice the most. Certainly another thing has been, when I think about disease management and diseases in particular. Again when I was first working on a golf course with bentgrass greens, you were concerned with brown patch and Pythium, those were the only two diseases you were concerned with. Well now there’s a whole host of diseases you have to be concerned with. I don’t know if they just evolved over time or what, but the superintendents today have to really be on the ball to manage both bentgrass and bermudagrass because things have changed. I don’t ever remember seeing spring dead spot in bermudagrass fairways, or large brown patch in bermudagrass fairways, that’s all new. So superintendents today have to figure out how to maintain those grasses and deal with those diseases. So that’s been the biggest change that I’ve seen.
What would you say is the biggest challenge facing the industry right now?
From what I’ve read, it appears to be that perhaps both universities as well as golf course and other people within the industry may be having difficulty with labor and manpower or getting students interested in that. Again, the whole industry is a very labor-demanding job, and I guess a lot of young people are not willing to put in that type of hard manual labor to do the work, so I would say that’s probably one of the biggest challenges facing the entire industry is labor in general.
When you are not working or participating in education and TTA events, what do you do outside of work?
Now that I’m getting older, I like to just relax. I like to do nothing at all! I enjoy playing golf. I’m not a great golfer, I’m probably bogey golf, occasionally I will have a good round or two. I’m fortunate, again, to work with Mr. Tom Cochran, who is an avid golfer and we’ve been on some great golf trips together, so that’s probably my biggest thing that I enjoy is playing golf when I get a chance to. I enjoy relaxing at home, my wife and I spending time together to go and visit – our sons are all three grown and out of the house – so we like to get an opportunity to go see them. Two of them live out of state and one of them lives in Nashville, so we like to go and visit them and spend time with family.
Receiving the Tom Samples Turfgrass Professional of the Year is a great honor and you’re certainly in good company among previous winners, what does that mean to you?
It really means a great deal for me. Just the fact that it’s coming from the Tennessee Turfgrass Association. I’ve been involved in it for such a long period of time, and I’ve got so many great memories and I love attending the conference because I can get the opportunity to see friends that I haven’t seen in a long time.
I definitely think that it was appropriate that it was renamed from the TTA Professional of the Year to the Tom Samples Professional of the Year. He’s done so much for this industry and I even look back on my notes, and I remember this as well. We, as a Board of Directors, decided somewhere around 1990 or 1991 to begin offering this award. I think Dr. Callahan was the first recipient and I’m not sure of the second, but I’m pretty sure Dr. Samples was the third recipient, and I know for a fact that I presented him with this award at the conference. He and I have been great friends ever since he was hired, he’s always been there to help you or assist you or answer a question. Just the fact that you try to call him right now, and he’s somewhere else. He’s always on the road, he’s always out helping somebody, and he has been probably the greatest ambassador for the turfgrass industry in Tennessee that we’ve had.
What advice would you give young people just entering the turfgrass industry now?
Obviously, it’s not an easy job. I’m not sure it’s an old man’s job, it’s a young man’s job. But there are still people in our industry that are my age and older that continue to do the work. My advice to somebody coming in is to try to be sure that you make time to balance your life. It’s not all work. It can easily be a 24/7 job if you let it. But I don’t think it has to be that way. I think you can balance your life where you’ve got time to spend with family as well as time to be at work. And you’ve got to be able to let that job go when you get home. You can’t carry it with you and I’ve always tried to do that. Some people might not agree with that philosophy. But I just think that you’ve got to work when you’re there, and when you’re finished, just let it go. There’s only so many hours a day, you can only do so much work and then you’ve just got to let it go.
What has been your favorite or most surprising thing about being in the turfgrass industry?
The thing I value the most is the way members share ideas. If someone needs some help, at least from my end, I’ve always experienced this, I could call up another superintendent or another person in the industry and say, “Have you experienced this, have you dealt with it,” and everybody’s always willing to share information to help someone else.
I remember when I first became a superintendent in Columbia, it might have been a year or two in, but the Jacobsen distributor in Nashville was having a customer appreciation day or something so I went up there from Columbia and I met a couple of superintendents from Clarksville, some people may recognize the names, others may not. One of them was Harold Franklin, he was the superintendent in Clarksville, I think he may still be a superintendent at a course, I believe he’s in Georgia, but I’m not 100% certain. The other individual that was a superintendent was Nick Nicholson, and most people will know Nick from his years that he spent as a representative at Smith Turf & Irrigation. When I met the two of them, I described the golf course at Graymere, which at that time, I think we had irrigation on maybe four fairways, it was a single-line, center-line irrigation with quick couplers and there just wasn’t a whole lot there and I was trying to grow bermudagrass, trying to get more bermudagrass, establish the fairways and the two of them had similar situations at their courses in Clarksville. They shared with me what they did in terms of aerification of fairways, how much bermudagrass seed they were putting down, when they put it down, what fertilizer they added, all this stuff and they told me all this and I was able to incorporate a lot of their ideas into programs I was doing at Graymere. That’s just one example of how people share ideas and are willing to help someone else down the road. So that’s the thing I value most in this industry.
Family photo; Amanda (daughter in law) and Brock Turner, John Turner and girlfriend, Sarah Curtis, Rob Turner, Judy and Frank Turner (December2019)
We would like to thank Frank Turner for his years of service and dedication to the turfgrass industry and to TTA.
