Mike Trimble, Arkansas journalist, dies at 78

Mike Trimble had an irascible cat.

He named it J. Smith, after U. S. District Judge J. Smith Henley.

Word got back to the judge, who accosted Trimble in the hall one day. “Mr. Trimble, I understand that you have a cat named J. Smith. Could you tell me why you named that cat that?”

Trimble, a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette, stammered around for a while.

“Are you trying to say that you have an ill-tempered cat, Mr. Trimble?” Henley asked.

“Well, actually, judge, I am trying very hard not to say that,” responded Trimble.

Mike Trimble, well known for his writing at publications in Arkansas and Texas, died Saturday at his home in Denton, Texas. He was 78.

Trimble’s sister, Pat Paterson of Little Rock, said cancer was the cause.

Trimble’s career spanned 48 years, starting at the Texarkana Gazette and followed by jobs at the Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Times, Pine Bluff Commercial, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Denton Record-Chronicle.

Besides being a reporter, Trimble was a columnist. For 11 months out of his 18 years at the Arkansas Gazette, Trimble wrote the Arkansas Traveler column.

It was a prestigious position. The column ran in the Gazette from 1956 until the newspaper closed in October 1991. The column continued for a few more years in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Four men — Ernie Deane, Bob Lancaster, Charles Allbright and Trimble — wrote the bulk of the Arkansas Traveler columns.

“They were wordsmiths of the first order; among the best writers Arkansas has produced,” Rex Nelson wrote in a column for the Democrat-Gazette.

One of Trimble’s columns was about a former prostitute and bootlegger who lived in a houseboat on the White River at Des Arc. “She had a pet pig by the name of Pork Chop that she used to drive around in her car and feed beer to,” Trimble said in a 2000 interview with Ernest Dumas.

Travis Mac Trimble (known as “Mike”) was born Nov. 3, 1943, to Edgar Mac Trimble and Frances Trim Trimble, schoolteachers who had moved to Arkansas from Louisiana and had settled at Bauxite.

Mike Trimble’s father taught before working for Alcoa, and his mother taught English to generations of students — including Trimble and his sister.

Trimble attended journalism school at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville for three years, with plans to be a photographer. But he changed his mind and decided to be a reporter instead.

He went to work for the Texarkana Gazette in 1963 and was hired away by the Arkansas Gazette in 1966.

Initially, he worked there as a general assignment reporter.

Trimble has a devout following of readers. As a columnist, he wrote about a wide variety of topics, including his dogs Red and Pearl, who chewed up all his furniture and caught herself on fire.

But the popularity seemed to weigh heavily on him.

Trimble relinquished the Arkansas Traveler column so he could go back to reporting.

“I didn’t think I was doing a good job, and plus I wasn’t having any fun,” Trimble told Dumas. “Just real stressful.”

Afterwards, Bob Lancaster hired Trimble to work at the Arkansas Times.

After a few years, Trimble left and went to work at the Pine Bluff Commercial, where he wound up marrying his boss, Jane Ramos.

Then she had to fire him because the paper had a nepotism policy.

For the next three years, Trimble worked as a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The couple moved to Texas when Jane was named publisher of the daily Weatherford Democrat and Mike became a copy editor and reporter, city editor and finally editorial writer for the Denton Record-Chronicle, according to an obituary the family submitted to the funeral home. Mike Trimble remained at the Record-Chronicle until the end of his journalistic career.

Trimble