PEORIA MAGAZINE September 2022

C O V E R S T O R Y

THE TURNERS BEHIND THE TURNER CENTER Bob and Carolyn Turner share their good fortune to tip the dominoes in Peoria’s economic favor

BY MIKE BAILEY

W ere it not for a certain couple, there might not be a Center for Entrepreneurship at Bradley University. Were it not for the Turner Center, theremight have been 32,000 fewer jobs retained and created in central Illinois over the last two decades, 700 fewer business start-ups, some $4.5 billion less in government contracts, another $84 million less in private equity investment, and fewer opportunities for 4,500 BU students working on nearly 900 community-based programs. It’s funny how the dominoes fall in making a community a better place. So, who exactly are these Turners behind Bradley’s Turner Center? Bob and Carolyn Turner are Illinois natives, the parents of four (one a BU grad), the grandparents of seven—soon to be eight. They nowreside in Savannah, Georgia, enjoying the life afforded them by very successful careers. They’re also among the top donors to Bradley University in its 125-year history, having given some $7.5 million. They are partners in every sense of the word, and though Carolynmatriculated

homemaker when they were young. “It was kind of a bubble but a comfortable bubble” for Bob and his two siblings, Mark and Susan. “You were very insulated to the outside world, other than we’d go to Peoria on Sundays and shop or have a meal.” Carolyn Witruk, meanwhile, was growing up in Chicago’s western suburbs – specifically, Elmhurst – also the eldest of three children, the daughter of a union mechanic. At the U of I, she’d learn the skills necessary to teach the deaf in Chicago’s Public Schools. For Bob, a first

The Turner family

at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, their fingerprints are all over the Hilltop, including Bradley’s pioneering Business and Engineering Convergence Center. The two of themwere recognizedwith the President’s Award in 2010, and Caro lyn is an honorary alum. Bob is a former chairman of BU’s Board of Trustees. The latter’s story began in nearby Yates City, then a community of fewer than 900 people where Bob and his brother “literally must have mowed every yard.” His father, Bob, was a union pipefitter, his mother, Janet, a

generation college student, “Bradley was the opening to a much broader perspective.” When he graduated in 1977, however, “I’d just turned 21 and

the only thing I’d learned from an accounting degree was that I didn’t want to be an accountant.” He had an offer in the tax department at Commonwealth Edison, but “if there’s a hell on Earth, it’s the tax department.”

26 SEPTEMBER 2022 PEORIA MAGAZINE