There are not many people in this world who could be called more down-to-earth than Jim Gill.
Gill, who was president of the Roswell Seed Company, died on March 16 in Albuquerque.
“I would rather walk a planted field than stroll along a beach,” Gill told the Roswell Daily Record in 2021. “My daughters (Jamie Beth Gill and Emily Gill Manatt) would groan whenever I said ‘we were going out to watch a crop grow.’”
James (Jim) Frank Gill was born June 16, 1948, to Walter Lee Gill Jr. and Iola McCombs Gill in Clovis.
Jim Gill began working at his family’s business, then called Roswell Seed and Feed, sweeping floors to earn $1 for weeks of work when he was 8 years old. The business has been in Gill’s family for four generations, initially founded in 1898 in Hagerman as a furniture store, but later moved to Roswell. It is reportedly the oldest family-owned business in New Mexico.
“The family history says that nice Christian people lived in Hagerman and that Roswell was just a little bit on the rough side,” Jim Gill told the Daily Record in 2012, “As it turned out, Roswell was where the money was.”
Gill graduated from Roswell High School in 1966 and attended New Mexico State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering. He later earned a master’s degree in agriculture administration from Eastern New Mexico University.
After working nine years at a feedlot, Gill decided to return to Roswell.
“I saw enough money lost in the cattle industry and decided to come back to seeds,” Jim Gill said in 2012.
As a youth, Gill was a Cub Scout. Later, his den mother would become his mother-in-law.
“He just thought I was a pesky little sister,” Shirley Gill said.
Years later, after they both had moved back to Roswell, a friend of Jim Gill’s was married to one of Shirley Brabham’s friends.
“She…
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