I'm among that fortunate group of Arkansans who read Mike Trimble's stories and columns in the Arkansas Gazette. Running out to the driveway to pick up that morning's Gazette was part of my routine as a boy growing up in Arkadelphia. The Gazette's "Arkansas Traveler" column was one of the first things I read.
Trimble, who died of liver cancer in November 2021, was among those who wrote the column. As luck would have it, the mail brought a copy of the newly released "The Thane of Cawdor Comes to Bauxite and Other Whimsy and Wisdom from the Pen of Mike Trimble," which recently was published by Little Rock's Butler Center Books.
Having had the good fortune of reading Trimble as a boy, I had the even better fortune of working with him as an adult when we were in the newsroom of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. I laugh aloud just thinking about the stories he would tell, many of which could never have appeared in the newspaper.
When I was political editor in 1993, then-executive editor Griffin Smith had the idea of compiling a 10 best and 10 worst of the Arkansas Legislature. Such lists were a staple of Texas Monthly magazine, where Smith had once been a star writer. Given control of the project and told I could recruit anyone in the newsroom to help, I immediately went to Trimble and asked him to be the primary writer.
In a memorable line, Trimble described the Arkansas House of Representatives as a body where "the shallow end runs the length of the pool." The newspaper no longer publishes such lists at the end of each legislative session, and that's probably for the best, since there's no Trimble to take the lead.
"Mike Trimble wrote as he lived--with mirthful appreciation for the human comedy, including his own," says longtime Gazette colleague Max Brantley. "But kindness and a generous spirit were at the root of his genius, along with a reporter's careful attention to detail, be it a Kiwanis Club talk or, speaking of comedy, a session of the Arkansas Legislature."
Ernie Dumas, another former Gazette colleague, spent years pulling Trimble's work together for this book. In a masterful foreword, Dumas quotes from the Arkansas Times obituary: "Trimble was Arkansas' and perhaps the country's greatest self-deprecating journalist."
"Readers will find in the following selections from Trimble's 50-year inventory of wit and wisdom all the vindication they might seek for that quaint judgment--the rare humble author," Dumas writes. "Whether he was chronicling rising political worthies like the far-into-the-future governors Asa Hutchinson and Mike Beebe, or, more often, the ordinary and feckless people that he encountered every day, befriended, and spent most of his career writing about, Trimble usually found a way, subtly or artlessly, to bring up his own failings."
Trimble would talk about identifying the wrong person as the dead woman in an obituary for the Texarkana Gazette. Dumas contends that Trimble's "confessed bumblings" were "purposeful and studied instruments of his humor."
"Like his friend Charles Portis, who wrote five marvelous novels about the adventures of quaint Southern characters, Trimble would scoff at being compared to Mark Twain, as in 'the Mark Twain of the 20th century,' which was an occasional refrain about Buddy Portis," Dumas writes. "It is, however, an apt analogy for both men. Critics likened Portis' early novels about the odysseys of eccentrics like Norwood Pratt, Mattie Ross and Ray Midge to Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.'
"All three men started their writing careers as journalists before drifting into humor--Twain and Portis most famously as novelists, Twain and Trimble as authors of varieties of non-fiction humor built upon the vicissitudes of the social order and of life itself."
Trimble and Portis died 18 months apart in 2020 and 2021. Both were the sons of teachers and grew up in small Arkansas towns. Dumas, who like Trimble and Portis hails from south of Little Rock, notes that Portis and Trimble were "steeped in the swagger, name-calling lingo and imaginative metaphors of boys and laboring men. The idiomatic style, expressed best in the dialogue of all their works, would come to define the style and art of both men."
The two famous columns in the Gazette were "Our Town" and "The Arkansas Traveler." Portis, Bob Lancaster, Ernie Deane, Charles Allbright and Richard Allin were among the noted journalists who wrote those columns. Lancaster, yet another wordsmith from the pine woods of south Arkansas (he hails from Grant County), preceded Trimble as the "Arkansas Traveler" columnist.
Lancaster took a job at The Philadelphia Inquirer (he later returned to the state; we know what Portis said about Arkansans' inability to achieve escape velocity) and used his final Gazette column in 1973 to introduce Trimble to readers.
"He's 29 years old, a bachelor, and has trouble with his spelling," Lancaster wrote. "He had a cat that was run over by a car last year. He bought a motorcycle in North Little Rock once and learned to ride it on the trip back home. His father, Mac Trimble, is a retired safety director at the Alcoa plant at Benton. His mother, Frances Trimble, is a retired high school English teacher.
"He was born and reared in Bauxite and still thinks it's the greatest place in the world despite the fact that it no longer exists. Kids growing up in Bauxite in that era didn't have much to do except go over to Benton because the nearest jukebox and drive-in restaurant were over there. So Trimble went to Benton a lot."
Trimble, in fact, was the noseguard for the Bauxite Miners when Lancaster was the right offensive end for the Sheridan Yellowjackets. Trimble's father had been a teacher before getting a better-paying job with Alcoa.
The book's name comes from a Trimble piece about the success of an English teacher at Bauxite High School in turning a Miner football star into a Shakespeare muse. The teacher was Trimble's mother. The football player, Bud Richards, was assigned to play Macbeth. The story, published in the Arkansas Times in 1985, is considered a Trimble classic.
Trimble spent two years at the University of Arkansas before taking a job at the Texarkana Gazette in 1963. He came to the Gazette in 1966, where he was a police reporter, federal court reporter and general assignment reporter.
"His news stories and features always picked up observations that other reporters would miss," Dumas says. "Writing about a fancy event at the Little Rock Country Club honoring an early civic and civil rights leader, Trimble's news article noted that the steaks were 'as big as saddle blankets' and that the honoree was the only Black person in the big crowd who didn't wear the white jacket of a servant."
Dumas says the Gazette publisher was irked by the story but didn't have Trimble fired. He says Trimble felt inadequate to be the "Arkansas Traveler" columnist but soon "had a rabid following, especially in the newspaper corps.
The expectation that every column had to achieve some majesty was more than Trimble could bear. He went back to reporting and soon quit."
Trimble later wrote for the Arkansas Times and then the Pine Bluff Commercial. When he married the Commercial's editor, he had to leave due to a company nepotism policy. That's how we wound up working together at the Democrat-Gazette. Trimble spent his final years writing stories and editorials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
"The publisher of the Denton newspaper fired him in 2014 for refusing to write more conservative pieces," Dumas writes. "It was his last job."
Dumas says that if Trimble were still around, "he would modestly protest the publication of a collection of his stuff. It doesn't rise, he would say, to that level of distinction." Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. There's magic in these 381 pages of prose, the magic of a humble Arkansas wordsmith.
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.