AZ Historymaker 2014, Marshall Trimble continues to share stories of Arizona. (his oral history at HistoricalLeague.org/Historymakers)
State Historian Marshall Trimble was born and raised in Arizona. He taught Arizona history to school children and college students. He travelled around the state and struck up conversations at every stop. He recounted the stories he heard in writing. Now, on America’s 250th anniversary, he reflects on the many tales of opportunity in Arizona’s history and reflects on his own ascent to a nationally published historian writing on the state and country he calls home. Questions and answers have been lightly edited for style and clarity.
What led you to immerse yourself in Arizona history?
I was born here, and my story is kind of interesting in that we lived in a trailer house. Five of us lived in a little two room trailer house when I was a kid. My dad had been a farmer, but he never owned his own land. He never even graduated from high school. And he used to say to me, Marshall, he said, ‘Go to college if you can. Just know it. If you can, go to college. It’s possible for you to go to college.’
I went to Phoenix College. I came from a high school of about 30 students in a little railroad town, and my dad didn’t make enough money for us all to have anything. My mother had to work as a waitress. I could go to Phoenix College for $17 a semester, and that was in the 1950s, so that wasn’t that long ago. It sure wasn’t to me, but I was the first in my family to go to college, and I did it working at Encanto Park for $1 an hour and paid my way through the first two years of college. Then I was able to go on to ASU. It had just become ASU in about 1958. I got a master’s degree, and I started out as a school teacher, teaching Arizona history at a local high school here in Scottsdale. It was starvation wages. Then, I just fell into a job teaching Arizona history at Scottsdale Community College, and next thing you know, my students said, Marshall, you should write a book, and I said, I can’t even write a good term paper, just barely graduated from college, and they said, but “Tell your stories, just tell the stories. Your students love to hear the stories about Arizona.” I thought about that for a couple of days, and I sat down one night and wrote a whole chapter on a topic. I submitted a manuscript to Doubleday in New York, and doggone it, they published it. I couldn’t believe it when I got word they bought it. They offered me $10,000. That was more than I was making a whole year as a teacher. I thought maybe I hit on something here, and next thing, oh, I’m autographing books, and publishers are asking me to write something else. I know that was unusual, probably, but the opportunity was there to do that. Only in America could that have happened.
