By Roy Ockert Jr.
I met John Troutt Jr. when I came to work at The Jonesboro Evening Sun as a part-time sports writer in the fall of 1963, my freshman year at then-Arkansas State College. My boss was Tom McDonald, sports editor at the time, but my desk in the small front office was also near the desks of John Jr. and Editor Gene Smith.
I had already worked for a year, mostly covering sports, at the Hot Springs daily newspapers, and coming here I got a dime raise — to $1.25 an hour.
John Jr. was called city editor then, but he was the newspaper’s chief reporter. He covered any story of importance, including the police beat and City Council.
That was impressive to me because the Hot Springs newspapers, serving a more cosmopolitan population, put more emphasis on national and international news. They cover local news, but not many made the front page.
But Smitty, John Jr. and Tom quickly taught me that local news is what sells the local newspaper. The next summer I put the theory to work at my hometown newspaper, expanding coverage of sports at area schools, including the all-black Langston High.
Thus, my mentors at The Sun became my role models, and I even tried to look like them, reasoning that I didn’t look old enough to be a professional journalist. I bought a hat and overcoat, then took up smoking a pipe. Somewhere hidden deep in a box at home is a picture of a ridiculous-looking kid in that get-up, missing only a “Press” card on the hat.
That was the beginning of my transition from sports to news. While I never gave up my love of sports, I learned that covering local, state and sometimes national news was much more interesting and important in the long term. That was reinforced on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, when John Jr. came in with the newspaper’s biggest story of the year — a murder-suicide at Trumann. Only hours later that story was pushed aside by one of the 20th century’s biggest stories.
Gene Smith left The Sun in 1964 to work for Citizens Bank, and John Jr. became managing editor. His dad John Sr. and uncle Fred still owned the paper. John Sr. died in 1966, but Fred remained active until his death in 1980. John Jr. was editor and publisher until the family sold the newspaper to the Paxton Media Group in 2000.
During his tenure The Sun became a morning newspaper, published seven days a week, and its Sunday circulation grew to more than 30,000. A new press was housed in the old National Guard armory down the street, and a new building was constructed beside it to house the rapidly expanding staff.
The Sun became known as one of the foremost advocates and defenders of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. The newspaper filed more than a dozen FOIA cases and never lost one. Two of them went to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and one, North Central Association v. Troutt Brothers, is considered a landmark decision.
Three times The Sun was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the third time – for coverage of the Westside School tragedy in 1998 – should have been the charm.
I left my sports writing job with The Sun after two years but remained in touch with John, both as a college teacher and later as an editor of other newspapers. He was a valuable resource, always willing to provide advice, counsel and support.
One of the great honors of my career came after I transferred here in 2001, following John as editor. I kidded him that it took two of us to replace him.
During the years that followed I called on him often because he was a walking encyclopedia of local history. While many other old-timers could remember bits and pieces of old stories, John could cite chapter and verse, names, dates and places. He had amazing recall. If I needed some background about something the City Council did in 1988, one call would be enough.
I managed to “pay it back” a little in 2012 when I nominated him for the Arkansas Press Association’s Distinguished Service Award, which he won for lifetime achievements. But the highlight of that experience, at least for me, was getting John to sit down for an interview — sort of turning the tables on a man who had mostly been on the other side of interviewing.
And I even learned a few things that not many people knew — because John seldom talked himself. An example: He had been a “guinea pig” for testing of the atomic bomb in Nevada while serving in the U.S. Army in the early 1950s.
Even though John was 88 years old and had been in ill health, it was still something of a shock when I received news of his death on June 14 — appropriately from a Sun reporter. Since then many tributes have been offered to this lion of Arkansas newspapering.
But the Rev. Fred Haustein, pastor emeritus of the First United Methodist Church, may have summed it up best at the memorial for John. He was a man who worked behind the scenes, Brother Fred said, who wrote headlines but didn’t make them, and who neither needed nor sought the spotlight.
Oh, but how he got things done — for his family, his newspaper, his community, his state and his nation. We will benefit from the life he lived for many years.
Roy Ockert, a retired editor of The Sun, can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.