Hugh Turnbull — known to generations of Creswell students as Mr. T — left this world on April 23, 2026, in Chicago, at the age of 86, with Debby holding his hand.
Hugh was born in Akron, Ohio, to David R. Turnbull II and Anna Ruth Martin Turnbull, and moved with his family to Havertown, Pennsylvania, as a toddler. He grew up there alongside his brothers David and James. He was named for a great-great-grandfather who fought for the Union in the Civil War, and decades later he would inherit that ancestor’s letters home and retrace his movements through the South on separate road trips with each of his sons — one of many ways he made his love of history personal.
He attended Antioch College, graduating in 1962 with a degree in biology. Antioch’s co-op program sent him out into the world, and the world took. When his father took a USAID post in South Vietnam, his mother bought him and his brother David round-the-world tickets to come visit one summer — a trip that sparked a curiosity about people and places that never left him.
Like many in his generation, Hugh heard President Kennedy’s call to serve and answered it. In 1962 he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Gujarat, India, where he taught college biology for two years. One summer break, when most volunteers traveled for leisure, Hugh traveled south — to teach children from the so-called “untouchable” class, kids who, in that time and place, were not expected to be taught at all. He never thought much of it; it was simply, to him, the work in front of him.
But one evening in the mid-1980s, the phone rang at the family home in Creswell, and the voice on the line was South Asian. A radiologist in Indiana had spent years tracking Hugh down. He had been one of those children, and he had called, after all that time, simply to say thank you.
Hugh also returned from India dramatically thinner, having contracted dysentery, and carried a shirtless photo of his emaciated self in his wallet for decades — pulling it out to show, with some delight, anyone who would look.
He came back to the States and took a job at the Job Corps center in Tillamook, Oregon — his introduction to what he would forever call “God’s country.” In 1969 he moved to Creswell to teach and to launch the middle school football program. There he met a fellow new teacher, Debby. They married in 1976, raised their sons Josh and Zach, and built a life in a small Oregon town that suited Hugh exactly.
He taught fourth grade for more than a decade before moving up to the middle school, where he taught social studies, English, and computers until retiring in 1998. He was, by his own admission, disorganized. He was dry-funny. He pushed his students, and he had a gift for seeing the kids who felt unseen — handing out nicknames freely, including the one that came back to him when “The A-Team” was on television and Mr. Turnbull became, permanently, Mr. T. Former students remembered him as a teacher who cared about them as individuals and wouldn’t let them settle. He was a softie, though he didn’t show it easily.
For many years he helped run a week-long outdoor school, where the students called him Grizzly on account of the beard he’d let grow in the weeks leading up to it. Each evening he’d pull out his guitar and lead the kids in song under the trees — a setting in which he was, perhaps, most fully himself.
Hugh joined the Cascade Chorus in 1982 and sang baritone with them for more than four decades. The chorus was a great love and a deep source of friendship; for a couple of those years, Josh sang alongside him. Music, broadly, was his constant companion: he was always singing — barbershop standards, folk songs, whatever was in his head — and he understood, instinctively, how a song could lift a room.
He was a passionate organic gardener whose garden was always gloriously oversized, which gave him the excuse to push tomatoes and squash on every friend and neighbor who would take them. He kept bees for a stretch, raised chickens and pigs, and he and Debby made a Christmas tradition of baking fruitcakes — the good kind — and shipping them to friends and family across the country. He loved small-town life and rarely came home from the grocery store on schedule, having run into a former student and made time, as he always did, to hear how their life was going.
Family weekends often meant Yachats, on the Oregon coast, where his parents had retired. Summers brought trips to Alaska to see Debby’s mother Shirley, of whom Hugh was deeply fond.
In retirement, Hugh stayed busy with the chorus, drove special-needs kids as a second vocation, and devoted considerable energy to Sophie and Janos, the two vizslas he and Debby took on as a retirement project — and, as he sometimes admitted, a retirement distraction. He could most often be found running them through a filbert orchard near the house. He was proud of his sons: he coached both boys in tee ball and stayed closely involved with the Boy Scouts as Zach earned his Eagle.
In 2024, Hugh and Debby left Oregon for Chicago to be closer to Josh. Hugh was stubborn to the end and would never quite admit he liked Chicago — though he did concede, repeatedly, that he liked the restaurants, and he loved watching the 606 trail and the downtown skyline from their condo.
Hugh is survived by his wife of 50 years, Debby; his sons, Josh of Chicago and Zach (and his partner Sarah Dugan) of Buffalo, Wyoming; and his brother James (Ellen) of Lititz, Pennsylvania. He was preceded in death by his parents and his brother David.
A reception to celebrate Hugh’s life will be held this summer in Oregon, when his family will bring him home to God’s country.
To honor Hugh’s legacy, support the next generation of singers with a donation to the Cascade Chorus Youth Fund, PO Box 700111, Springfield, OR 97475, Attn: Rich Watkins.
Sing something today. He would have.
For more information, visit www.smithcorcoran.com or call 773-736-3833.
