Marble Falls Sometimes it feels funny to be back in Arkansas. I lived here from June 1970, when I was coming from a stint in Massachusetts with the National Welfare Rights Organization to found ACORN, and lived in Little Rock until 1978, when we moved the national office to New Orleans. I was back from time to time for meetings, business with the union when we expanded Local 100 in the early 80s, and for her family reunions with mi companera. I never really planned to be back. Then a more than a dozen years ago in late 2012, I was lured back on a more regular basis to help keep KABF going, which put me on an almost monthly routine of 800-mile round trips between Little Rock and New Orleans.
I hankered for the West, when I thought of mountains and streams. That’s where I was born and raised for a while in Wyoming and Colorado oil fields. When it comes to August, our vacations would be on the road, running from the heat, and it was the West where we would drive, camp, fish, and climb, packing our kids in one vehicle after another stacked to the gills. Back then, I imagined at this time of life that there’s where I would spend the summers and more. Instead, still working, and trading one dream for another, and now still heading to Little Rock, I end up spending days and weeks in the Ozarks near the Buffalo River in the mountains not far from something that used to be called Dogpatch, a one-time amusement area named after the old Lil’ Abner daily comic strip about hillbillies.
I was thinking about all of this while reading a book about a former newspaper reporter and columnist, Mike Trimble. I knew Mike in 1970. We were tenants in the same big house in the heights on Ridgeway Drive for the first six months or so after I moved here for good. I once helped him push his big Triumph motorcycle up the hills to the place, when it broke down for some reason. Now every spring, I meet with Ernie Dumas, who I also knew back in the early 70s when he was a reporter at the capital and then on the editorial board. We had met through Mamie Ruth Williams and Pat House, veterans of the ’57 Central High integration crisis, who had both ended up in politics on the progressive side. Mamie Ruth used to collect newspaper people it seemed, so it was natural that my path would have crossed Ernie’s.
Ernie is a raconteur, and there aren’t many left. He’s not young anymore either, but older than me. His mind is still razor sharp, and on the excuse of me trying to raise money for the radio station, we’ll meet for coffee near his place, and I’ll prompt him to tell one story after another for a couple of hours. A couple of years ago, he mentioned that Trimble had died, and asked if I remembered him. It turned out that he had convinced the library’s Butler Center to publish a book that collected a bunch of Mike’s writings for papers in Arkansas and Texas. After I saw Ernie recently, I went by the bookstore, partially owned by Lia Lent, who had worked for ACORN and AM/FM back in the day. They had a copy of Ernie’s Trimble collection.
Most of the pieces were from the early 70s. It brought back a lot of memories, because people from that time kept coming up in his stories who were long gone or lost to me. I can remember Ted Boswell, an almost candidate in 1970, telling me about Norman Thomas speaking at his family place between Bryant and Bauxite. There were a number of great pieces about the court hearings seeking to declare the Pulaski County prison farm unconstitutional. Phil Kaplan had been the main lawyer, and I can still remember meeting him in the first months I was in Little Rock in the law offices of John Walker’s firm. I met Jack Lavey then, who handled many cases for ACORN, including our suit against the Wilbur Mills Expressway. Somehow, I had not realized that Steve Herman was on that prison case with Phil. I had camped out the first couple of weeks in Little Rock at a place rented by a VISTA lawyer, Jay Lipner, who was from Corpus Christi, and later shows up as a key lawyer for ACT-UP in New York City. Steve and his wife were from New York and lived next to Jay. He was a Reginald Heber Smith fellow working out of the Legal Aid office, where I also borrowed office supplies and used the telephone before we had an office.
The book was a treat for me. Brought back memories back in the day. Few are left to tell those stories. What Ernie did for Mike, someone needs to get ready to do for Ernie. Back in the day still informs these days. We need to take care of these stories, and the people who populate them. They mattered then, and they matter now.