Ky. publisher's bailiwick ended at the county line, but she set an example and spurred a bill that helped rural newspapers

Blanche Bushong Trimble

Blanche Trimble, who died in June at 86 and was memorialized in many tributes Sunday afternoon in her Kentucky hometown, where she published the Tompkinsville News, never sought the spotlight. But it was clear at the end of Sunday's celebration of her life that she had meant a lot to her county, and to rural journalism.

"She was the person who did the most for Monroe County, as far as I was concerned," said Myrna Herron, who was the family and consumer sciences Extension agent in the Southern Kentucky county from 1969 to 2005. She and others recounted how Trimble was involved in almost every civic effort to improve the place, a persistent-poverty county on the western edge of official Appalachia. Trimble's sister, Carolyn Bushong Jordan, told the crowd at the First Baptist Church, "If you want her legacy to live on, get involved in something in the community that you are really passionate about."

Despite her civic activism, Trimble was a very private person who didn't enter Kentucky Press Association contests and never expressed an interest in serving on KPA's large board. Her newspaper world ended at the Monroe County line – until about a year before her death, when she helped get her hometown congressman, James Comer, on board with a successful national effort to expand the ability of newspapers to mail sample copies to non-subscribers at subscriber rates.

Comer was a key player because he oversees the Postal Service as ranking Republican on the Oversight and Reform Committee. "There was but one person I would contact seeking his help," KPA Executive Director David Thompson said of Trimble. "There was such a mutual respect between those two that I knew Blanche was key to getting his help." When Thompson gathered all the publishers in Comer's district for a Zoom call arranged by the National Newspaper Association, "I told them I would invite all of the 42 newspapers to be represented on the call, but there was only one who was key to getting Congressman Comer’s support. That, of course, was Blanche Trimble. And how pleased Congressman Comer was to see his hometown newspaper publisher participating in the call. It didn’t matter if all the other 40 or so publishers each pleaded with 'Jamie' to support the Postal Reform Act; we only needed Blanche’s presence to show him how important this issue was to community newspapers. That effort paid off earlier this year when Congress enacted the Postal Reform Act and newspapers across the state have already seen the benefit of that effort."

Monroe County (Wikipedia map)

Monroe County is known in Kentucky for no-holds-barred politics, but Trimble negotiated that tricky landscape skillfully, said former Louisville Courier Journal political writer Al Cross, who runs the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog. A native of nearby Clinton County, Cross noted that when Blanche and Joe Trimble bought the paper and moved to her hometown in 1976, they registered to vote as independents, which she said "blew everybody's mind" in the heavily Republican county. She told an interviewer in 1980 that she disliked being unable to vote in primary elections, but Cross told the crowd, "I think that’s one reason she did register independent – so candidates wouldn’t ask her for her vote, or wonder how she and Joe might have voted," Cross said. "For her, being an independent was more than voter registration; that was just a symbol of how she approached the job of editing and publishing The Tompkinsville News."