Frances Trimble
Mac was a Trimble; Frances was a Trim, she brooked no teasing about their names.
Frances Trim was born the fourth of five children on a farm in a small Mississippi town on July 4. 1909. The fifth child born to the family was a difficult birth and the family’s mother died giving birth. As was often custom in those days, the father, feeling unequipped to raise girls, he kept the three boys with him and sent the two girls, Frances and Pat, to a cousin, Miss Jo Mary Clayton, in New Orleans.
Miss Clayton was a spinster and scholar, the first woman to pass the bar in Louisiana. She was very strict in bringing up those two young girls and insisted on their higher education. Frances went to Louisiana State University at age 16, public schools in Louisiana back then only going through 11 grades. Her older sister attended Mississippi State College for women, where the students were required to wear navy blue clothing, a color she never wore again after graduation.
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Frances took a job teaching high school English in a tiny Louisiana town called Marxville. There she met Mac Trimble, a math teacher and football coach whose team called signals in Cajun French. Let there be no confusion about their names…Mac was a Trimble; Frances was a Trim, she brooked no teasing about their names.
The newlyweds soon moved to Searcy to teach and coach and became lifelong friends with Willard and Roy Smith. When Roy took a job with Alcoa in Bauxite, he urged the Trimbles to come to this idyllic little mining town. Mac coached many winning football teams and taught business math, before joining Alcoa as personnel and safety director. Frances became something of a legend as a teacher of junior and senior English.
To prove this statement, I will have to introduce myself, Pat Trimble Patterson, as the Trimble’s first child, born to them, December 3, 1941. My brother Mike came along a year and 11 months later, a trial to my childhood and a beloved brother until his death in 2021. Mother quit teaching to raise her babies until Mike, and I could walk to the junior high and high school. And thus began the legend.
Frances Trimble took on the sponsorship of Mike’s senior class. This also handed her the duty of director of the junior and senior plays. I donated a bracelet to the Bauxite Museum sometime back, with charms from the cast of each of her plays. Another set of charms came from the senior classes she sponsored. At graduation, for each of the twenty-something years she taught, she stood in the hall, as the seniors lined up to march into the auditorium. She checked that nobody was chewing gum and that the point of everyone’s tasseled caps was at the middle of each forehead. No sloppy, pushed back caps for Mrs. Trimble’s seniors.
Mrs. Trimble was known as a tough teacher, but I’m not sure why. If any of you all read my brother Mike’s wonderful story, “Bud Richards and the Scottish Play,” that he wrote for the Arkansas Times, you know that she found the best way to teach each student she had. She did want a well-behaved classroom and was often heard in the halls insisting in her soft Southern drawl that some young man tuck his shirttail in. Real rudeness and misbehavior in her book.
My mother also directed “The Womanless Wedding,” with Rudy Faulkner as the bride, for the Bauxite Lions’ Club and for several years directed the club’s annual Minstrel Show, now politically incorrect but popular and fun back then. I think Mother had more trouble with those Lions’ Club casts than with any of her high school thespians.
After Mother’s retirement, the two of us would often go for lunch at Benton’s downtown tearoom or to Walmart. Every single time, we met one of her former students, who wanted, right on the Main Street sidewalk, to thank Mrs. Trimble for all she had done for him or her. Mother was slightly embarrassed by those many tributes, but I hope she thought of each one again when she was home alone. Such gratitude they all had. What fondness.
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