Marine at the Core

Most Arizonans recognize Marshall

Trimble – the state’s official historian –

in a cowboy hat, or with a guitar

strapped across his shoulder. The

man who has become a champion

of all (good) things Arizona through his

popular storytelling and renditions

of folk music has become a local icon.

But on May 10, Trimble will be honored for wearing a hat of a different sort: that of a U.S. Marine. At the 2014 Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation Arizona Awards Dinner, he will receive the Semper Fidelis Award, given annually to honor a leader who exemplifies high principles and dedication to our country. The dinner raises money for scholarships for military children.

Trimble’s love of, and enthusiasm for, history and, in particular, Arizona history, is genuine. Get him started and he can tell story after story about the state and the characters who have been part of its past. He has regaled audiences at gatherings across the state and in high school classrooms when he taught and coached in Mesa and Scottsdale public schools and during his 40 years as a history teacher at Scottsdale Community College.

An Arizona native, Trimble spent his first eight years on a ranch outside Tempe and the next eight in Ash Fork, which he considers his hometown. The years in Yavapai County were hard. His father worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and was seldom home. His mother supplemented the family income by working as a waitress in a local café. And Trimble worked. By the time he was in his early teens, he worked at an all-night gasstation to bolster the family funds. He credits these years as character building.

But when he joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1957 after a year at Phoenix College, he gained new confidence and inspiration.  He considers his Marine Corps experience among the most meaningful and significant of his life. He loved the discipline the Marines instilled. Because his father worked away from home so much, he and his two brothers more or less “raised themselves.”

“It was the first structure I had ever had in my life,“ Trimble says. “The Marines gave me a strong sense of duty, ethics and patriotism that continues to this day. They instilled in me that through hard work and persistence, I could become anything I wanted to be.”

From the day he arrived in Camp Pendleton from Phoenix – his first time on an airplane – Trimble showed signs of leadership, perhaps because of his many years playing catcher on his high school, and later college, baseball team. “I was used to being in charge,” Trimble says. He was made a squad leader from the beginning.

His senior drill instructor, in particular, Staff Sargeant O.D. Fuller, impacted him in a lifelong, positive way. “He never smiled the whole time we were in boot camp,” Trimble says. “It’s exactly what I needed.”

Many of the leadership skills he learned, he learned from Fuller. Because the men were divided into platoons by height – tallest men first – Trimble’s platoon was at the back. And more, when someone got kicked out of one of the front platoons, the individual was sent back to Trimble’s platoon.

Fuller, who had seen action during the Korean War, said to him one day, “If I ever went back into combat, I would want you little guys behind me.”

“That really boosted our morale,” Trimble recalls. “I remembered that later when I was coaching. I always saw the kids who took the brunt of things, and I pulled them aside and told them just that.”

On graduation day from boot camp, Fuller said to Trimble, “You’re the most determined kid I’ve ever seen. If you choose to go back to college, you will make it."

Trimble did go back to Phoenix College, and later earned a degree from Arizona State University.

“I would have charged a brick wall if he had asked me to,” Trimble says.

Since his days in the Marines, Trimble has lost track of S.Sgt. O.D. Fuller, but he crops up often as a character – usually a wizened cowboy – in Trimble’s tales. It’s likely that when he accepts the Semper Fidelis Award on May 10, if he has the opportunity to tell a little story, O.D. Fuller might be part of it. 

At top, Marshall Trimble in his typical cowboy attire and dressed for the 2011 East Valley Veterans' Day

Above left, S.Sgt. O.D. Fuller on the left