This story is part of a series highlighting the contributions women have made to the Forest Service. If you’d like to nominate someone to be featured in a HerStory piece, please contact Patricia Burel.

NEW MEXICO—Meet Lucia Turner, retired deputy regional forester for Region 3. While still in high school, Turner began working for the Forest Service as a GS-3 clerk-typist for the Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station in Albuquerque. She moved shortly thereafter to a sister USDA organization, the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, known today as the Farm Service Agency. In the ASCS, Turner held increasingly responsible positions, serving as Federal Women’s Program coordinator for New Mexico and Texas and, ultimately, as a district director.

In 1991, Turner rejoined the Forest Service as administrative officer on the Cleveland National Forest for Region 5. On the Cleveland National Forest, and soon in Region 5 as a whole, Turner at once dived into issues related to the consent decree and the Hispanic class action lawsuit that rocked Region 5 in the 1980s and 1990s. She also worked as part of a team consolidating and reorganizing Region 5’s forest administrative staffs from 18 to five. Following the reorganization, Turner briefly transitioned to the Region 3 office in Albuquerque, working on financial management and forest recreation issues. In 1997 she took a job as assistant director for administration at the Northeastern Research Station and Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry Office in Radnor, Pennsylvania. When she was about to retire, Turner received a request to serve as Deputy Regional Forester for Region 3 in her home state of New Mexico. Working closely with Regional Forester Harv Forsgren and her co-Deputy Regional Forester, Abel Camarena, Turner not only oversaw a significant regional reorganization, she also shepherded the construction and opening of the Albuquerque Service Center. “Having to set up the ASC was like my third child,” she remembers, “because I was told I had to have a beautiful structure ready to go in nine months.” Turner at last retired from the Forest Service in 2008.

In a long and challenging career, Turner remembers personnel issues as some of her greatest challenges. While in Region 5, she was involved in major downsizing efforts related to budget cuts stemming from Endangered Species Act determinations and a move away from a focus on timber. Turner personally took on the unpleasant task of downsizing, to give her the opportunity to counsel employees and help ease their transitions as much as possible.

Turner keenly appreciates the mentorship she received in more than four decades of USDA service. “Every single time that I changed my job, that I changed positions, within the same agency or the same unit, I have always been supported by people who believe in me,” she remembers, all the way back to her very first supervisor, who urged her to take a GS-5 position with the ASCS. Perhaps her most important mentor in the Forest Service was Mike Duffy, whose quiet support helped her through more than one sticky situation. Recalling a major presentation to Washington Office higher-ups, Turner says, “I was scared to death. My knees were knocking. And I remember the deputy chief for administration was sitting at the end of the table and he just kept looking at me and smiling and he said, “You can do this.” And I did it.”

Follow the link to listen to Turner’s oral history.