Building a legacy

The opening of Lethbridge College’s new Trades, Technologies and Innovation Facility to students this past fall represented more than just the largest expansion in the institution’s history. It’s the ultimate fulfillment of one man’s vision of Lethbridge College as a leading centre for vocational and technical education, a vision more than 50 years in the making.

In December 1961, Dr. James (Jim) Twa was appointed the first-ever director of Vocational Education for what was then called Lethbridge Junior College. But long before that, Twa, who passed away in 2013, was a young man looking for a way out of the hardscrabble life on a small prairie farm.

“He was definitely someone who was a product of the Great Depression,” recalls his daughter Denise Wall (Agriculture Technology 1983). “He grew up near Talbot (just under 200 km east of Red Deer) where my grandpa had a small farm. He was one of the lucky ones who didn’t lose his tractor and that’s where [Jim] learned to fix things.”

Even in those early days, education asserted a strong hold on Twa, as it would throughout his life and career. “He came from a poor family and he and his older sister were the only ones who finished their Grade 12,” says Wall. “They would ride a horse bareback for four miles spring, fall, winter just to get to school.”

After finishing high school in 1946, Twa moved to the tiny hamlet of Craigmyle where he started his career. He was just 17 years old. “He used to talk about meeting the superintendent of the school, who wanted to know where the teacher was and my dad had to try very hard to convince the superintendent he WAS the teacher,” laughs Wall.

Over the next few years, Twa continued his teaching career as well as his own education, receiving a bachelor of education from the University of Alberta in 1957.

In 1961, while working as a shop teacher for Lethbridge public schools, he applied, and was hired, for the position of director of Vocational Services with the fledgling Lethbridge Junior College. His role would be to develop and administer the programs to fill the new vocational area of the four-year-old college. Twa toured other junior colleges in Canada and the United States for ideas and inspiration and put together advisory committees to build partnerships between the school and the industries who would depend on college grads to fill their ranks.

According to the history of the college written in 1992, when Twa was hired, “he was expected to do everything that was going to be done in technical and vocational education in the college, but no one really knew what that was going to be. …Twa was later to say that if he had known what the task was, he would have said it was impossible. …There was no Canadian model to follow, no legislation to cover what they were doing, but the board and Twa were willing to gamble, inventing and innovating as they went along.”

In September 1963, classes for the new vocational-technical school began with 10 faculty and 145 students enrolled in areas including automotive repair, radio/television technician, welding, sheet metal, commercial cooking, electrical and secretarial. Within five years, he worked to more than double the number of faculty and students in the vocational section, which, as stated in the faculty tribute when he was nominated to the Lethbridge College Hall of Fame, “placed the Technical-Vocational Section in a strong position when the University of Lethbridge was established in 1967. Without this position, the absorption and eventual demise of Lethbridge Junior College would have been a very real possibility. We are indebted more than we realize to Jim Twa for the present, vibrant college we all know today.”

For Twa, an education in the trades was an effective alternative to an academic university education for some students. “Education was a pathway for him,” says Wall. “For him, I think he saw education as a way off the farm and out of poverty and he really believed in it for his students and [his own children]. He’s the guy who would come home every day to give us a word of the day to increase our vocabulary.”

Twa built the new program during those early years at the college, eventually served as acting president of the college in 1967 and vice-president in 1967-68. He left the institution in 1968 to pursue his PhD at the University of Oregon, and returned with his family to Lethbridge in 1970 where he continued his career as a professor in the Faculty of Education at the newly-created University of Lethbridge. “He was the kind of guy who was the salt of the earth,” says Wall. “If you met him, you wouldn’t have known he was a professor, he never had that air. He didn’t like people calling him Dr. Twa. He preferred to be referred to as Jim as it didn’t separate him from his students.”

In 1986, after more than 40 years away from a farm, Twa returned to his roots, retiring to a small hobby farm near Raymond. “He would always be tinkering with things on the farm,” recalls Wall. “A tractor would die but instead of buying a part he’d improvise his own. He had such a mechanical mind, he should have been an engineer.”

“If you met him, you wouldn’t have known he was a professor, he never had that air. He didn’t like people calling him Dr. Twa, he thought that was way above him.”

{ Denise Wall }

Twa was inducted into the Lethbridge College Hall of Fame in 1989. While he lived out his retirement, his family followed in his footsteps in higher education. Wall graduated in 1983 from what was then called Lethbridge Community College in the Agricultural Technology program and later went on to get her education degree at the U of L. In turn, all three of Wall’s own children have gone on to post-secondary education, with daughter Jesse graduating from Lethbridge College with a diploma in Business Administration – Accounting in 2011.

“Education was extremely valued in our household by my family, and that definitely stemmed from my grandfather as he ingrained that into his children as well,” says Jesse Wall. “I was always under the impression that I needed to go to either college or university after high school and that’s what I did. Having both my Grandpa Jim and my mom going through Lethbridge College – they might have biased me a little bit to go to there.”

Wall’s son Murray went into the trades as a sheet metal worker. In a final twist, Murray worked on the construction of the new Trades, Technologies and Innovation Facility, the new home for the same programs his grandfather helped build.

Wall says the family remains proud of their connection to Lethbridge College and Jim Twa’s contribution to making the institution what it is today.

“I wish he could have seen [the new building] in his lifetime,” says Wall. “He would have been incredibly proud to see something that he was passionate about become reality in this way.”