Junkins grew up in the town of Dalton, Georgia on his family's five-acre farm, where he later attended North Whitfield High School and participated in the football and track and field teams. He began to be interested in Aerospace Engineering after watching the artificial satellite Sputnik 1 make history during his Freshman year of high school in 1957. This interest was reinforced after his high school track coach, Crossland Clegg, told Junkins that while he may have been great at track, he could tell Junkins was more talented academically than physically, during the spring of his senior year. Also, later the next year, after hearing President John F. Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech, Junkins elected to pursue aerospace engineering.
