Times Publisher, ‘75 Graduate Awarded NHS Alumnus of Year

Longtime newspaperman Tim Timmons likes to focus on people who are doing good things in the community.

It isn’t often that he gets the spotlight or even wants it.

However, on Saturday night, Timmons couldn’t help but have a big smile on his face as he heard his name called along with nice things being said about him.

Timmons — a 1975 graduate of Noblesville High School and who has spent most of his adult life working in newspapers — was named 2023 Noblesville High School Alumnus of the Year during the annual NHS Alumni Banquet in the NHS Cafeteria, attended by 225 guests.

He has “made a conscious effort in supporting the Alumni Association,” and has “excelled in his field of expertise,” and “has contributed to our society,” said Peggy Baldwin Beaver of Noblesville, the NHS Alumni Association’s board president and a member of the NHS Class of 1972.

Beaver said Timmons, who now lives in Seymour, came to her in 2014, interested in joining the NHS Alumni Association’s board and then joined in May of that year. He became board vice president in 2016 and president in 2017.

“Tim is very devoted to our Alumni Association. He’s been a key player in helping myself and other board members over the past few years when we’ve had to make some very difficult decisions. I don’t know if Tim realizes how much he has actually helped me personally with some of these hard decisions we’ve had to make,” Beaver said.

Timmons said he loves our great city and our public schools.

“Growing up in Noblesville, at the time that a lot of us grew up, was special. It wasn’t the Noblesville of today . . . Back then, it was a small town with a small-town feel,” said Timmons, who was born in Frankfort and moved to Noblesville with his family when he was a toddler.

“We had so many advantages. Nobody locked their doors at night. All of those things growing up in the ‘50s, ‘60s, early ‘70s. Noblesville had so much to offer. From our house, we’d ride our bikes to Forest Park. When I started playing tennis, we’d ride our bikes up to the tennis courts at the high school. We had our neighborhood group, but Noblesville was so close, we’d meet guys from all over the place and play pickup basketball or whatever. It was just a great town to grow up in. It was a great school system to go through,” he said.

The first place that his family lived, in the late 1950s, was in an old two-story apartment house on Cherry Street just east of 10th Street. Then they moved to 15th Street just off Monument and ended up on James Road. He went to Our Lady of Grace Catholic School which, at the time, went up to sixth grade. He then attended Noblesville Junior High School on Field Drive and then Noblesville High School on 17th Street where Ivy Tech Hamilton County Campus is now. He traveled to school on Bus No. 19, and his driver was Bob Guilkey.

He played seventh- and eighth-grade football at Noblesville Junior High School under coach Phil Shelby, who on the first day of football practice gave him the nickname, “Tim,” which stuck to this day.

Timmons’ legal name is Fayette Earl Timmons, a name he grew up disliking. His great-grandfather on his mom’s side of the family was named Lafayette. “His son, my grandfather, was Fayette, and I was Fayette,” he said.

Growing up, he loved reading and writing. “My mom was a voracious reader. She would go to the library, when the library was where City Hall is, and she would check out a dozen books and, in a week read all of them and go back and get a dozen more. When I was 4, she got me my first library card.” He was told, at the time, that he was “the youngest kid to have a library card in Noblesville.”

Timmons’ love for reading and writing grew every time he went to the library.

Back then, his family subscribed to The Indianapolis Star, The Indianapolis News and The Noblesville Ledger newspapers. “And I read all of those,” he said. Plus, whenever his family visited both his grandparents in Frankfort, he read the Frankfort Times newspaper and the Lafayette Journal & Courier.

“Because of (the late) Don Jellison,” Timmons said, “I wanted to be a sports writer.”

Timmons started writing for NHS Mill Stream student newspaper and penned a sports column, just like his newspaper hero. “Jellison was my favorite writer to read, by far,” Timmons said. He also liked to read longtime Indianapolis Star sports columnist and sports editor Bob Collins and longtime Indianapolis News sports editor Wayne Fuson. He also liked reading one of Chicago Tribune’s best columnists. Mike Royko, and Lafayette Journal & Courier’s Bruce Ramey.

“I grew up reading all of these folks, and that’s what I wanted to be, was to be like them,” Timmons said.

He credits his NHS English teacher, the late Rachel Heath, who pulled him aside after class one day and encouraged him to apply himself because she thought he had the ability to be a good writer. “That made all of the difference to me, because she clearly believed in me,” Timmons said. Then, his senior year, Timmons ended up giving a graduation speech at commencement after Heath asked him to write a graduation speech and turn it in with other students’ speeches, with the best selected to be read at graduation. Timmons said Heath was one of his favorite teachers.

He played tennis in high school and was good enough to continue playing in college. He went to college in West Virginia but left early because he wanted to be a tennis pro. “I didn’t make it. I got beat a lot,” he said. What kind of money did he make? “I made enough to sleep in my van a lot,” Timmons said, smiling.

Timmons dated a girl who was the editor of the Zionsville Times, and came upon a high school basketball story that he thought was poorly written. So she challenged him to try his hand at writing sports there himself. He covered Zionsville High School basketball the rest of that season. Then he took his newspaper clips with him to the Lafayette newspaper, which had an opening for a part-time sports position, typing agate, taking phone calls and more. That began a career that took him to Texas, North Carolina and California before eventually returning to Indiana. He left sports and moved into news and eventually management.

But when he was in North Carolina he heard that Gannett had bought his hometown paper the Ledger. “Everyone in the business knew that was not good for Noblesville,” Timmons said. So he wrote a business plan to create a paper for his hometown. However, Timmons didn’t have the capital to make it happen, so the plan went in a drawer for a few years – until he was the vice president and general manager of the South Bend Tribune. He was serving on the board of the state press association and his boss told him to keep an eye out for potential acquisitions. Timmons brought up his old plan for Noblesville and that led to a series of meetings after which the Schurz company ended up purchasing The Times, a weekly that had been in Noblesville since 1904. At the time, it was owned by Ted and Mary Sue Rowland.

Two years later, after Timmons’ first book was published. He left South Bend and joined with seven other business people to create what would eventually become Sagamore News Media. As he left South Bend, Timmons asked his boss to keep him in mind should they ever decide to sell Noblesville. A few years later, that’s exactly what happened. Timmons’ new company bought The Times and the story had come full circle.

Timmons’ greatest achievement over the years? “Being a dad,” he said. “Life’s about family, life’s about faith. Life is not about business.”

He and his wife, Linda, have two daughters and eight grandchildren, 11 months to 11 years of age. He met Linda in 1982 in Lafayette. He “I saw this tall, very attractive lady on the other side of the floor, asked her to dance, she said ‘yes,’ and the rest is history,” Timmons said. They’ll celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary in June.

He believes what newspapers do is still vitally important. “The whole picture has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. I think that we have to find a new model, and I don’t think anybody knows what that is,” said Timmons.

Timmons said, “It’s very humbling to get this (NHS Alumnus of the Year) Award (going on to name some of the past recipients). If you took a group picture of all of the Alumni of the Year, you could say, ‘What’s wrong with this picture? Oh, it’s Tim.’ ”

He calls the NHS Alumni Board a phenomenal group. “I don’t know that I’ve seen a better leader on a board than Peggy,” Timmons said. “She is phenomenal. She keeps everyone focused . . . we just had a banquet with a few hundred people . . . and it was a smooth, piece-of-cake operation. Peggy and the board makes it work. Karen Williams Pryor is our new president and she’ll do great, too. The board and the future are in good hands.”

-Betsy Reason writes about people, places and things in Hamilton County. Contact The Times editor Betsy Reason at betsy@thetimes24-7.com.