The Incomparable Zabriskie

Editor Chris Hall '82 #870 and his son, Whitman

Here is my Zabriskie moment. It is the first semester of my senior year at Pomona, and I am standing in the drafty hallway outside my room in Norton-Clark, half awake and clutching the communal hall phone. It is 7 a.m. on a Friday, an hour that seems as unsuited for wakefulness as four hours earlier had seemed ill-suited to sleep. I have forgotten what misadventure had kept me out the night before--most likely the charitable service of helping empty a keg--but I have not forgotten that I was distinctly the worse for it. My grasp of the receiver is wobbly. I am practically comatose. I am in my undershorts. Zib is on the phone.

And he is finding it particularly hilarious that I am so unsteady on this bright, crisp, glorious Fall morning. "Why, it's a beautiful day outside!" he chuckles, knowing full well that if I am destined to see any of it, it won't be until the far reaches of afternoon. In good-natured admonition he launches into verse:

Clay is still, but blood's a rover,
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up Boy! When the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.

"Uh, uh-huh, uh-huh, right," I lamely, gamely mumble. What on earth is he going on about? Whatever promise or obligation Zib wishes to extract from me is cheerfully extracted (I was a notorious over-committer in those days), the call is concluded, and I crawl back to bed.

Later that day, when I finally feel steady enough to venture out--and it is, by coincidence, about 4:00 p.m.--I hunt down an anthology of poetry that includes A. E. Houseman's "Reveille" from A Shropshire Lad: the very thing he had been proclaiming in my sleepy ear.

I never forgot it. (I learned later that it was Houseman who penned the lines "Malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man," and having had more than my fair share of both in my undergraduate term--surviving a class on the latter only through judicious application of the former--I can vouch for the soundness of that observation).

I didn't have to take a lit course to learn about Houseman--or Wordsworth or Tennyson for that matter. I had Zib calling me at (what then passed for) ungodly hours, cajoling some promised duty from me as though it were a favor, looking past my essential irresponsibility, seeing the potential in my callow surliness when others were repelled by it, and declaiming Great English Verse in the process.

As dreadful as I felt on some of those occasions (or at least those taking place before noon) I always enjoyed hearing Zib recite. He'd catch hold of the stray end of a stanza and start out in offhanded, syncopated cadence, almost as though reviewing it to himself. But within a few lines he would warm to the theme, and his oratory would grow robust and sure until, as the final lines came chugging to a close, he would break into shouts of laughter at having remembered the whole piece despite himself.

Zib, always delighted, always feigning surprise that I was not up and about before noon, probably got more work out of me than all of my professors combined.

I knew that hortative voice before I ever heard it, having devoured my first few issues of the Oak Leaf as a sophomore pledge in the belief that they would color me worthy as a Nu Alph. I blush now to recall the shameless manner in which I promoted my eligibility as a member of the fraternity, and when to my everlasting surprise I made it in, it was Zib's baroque prose in the newsletter that spoke to the exalted position I felt I had attained.

It is one of my greatest regrets that my tenure as an editor of the Oak Leaf has seen a steady decline in contributions from Zibby, for his style of writing set the tone for the sprightly middle age of the publication, to which we aspire to this day. Many of you know Zib's inimitable way with words well enough, but for many more of you who don't I confess I can give only the slightest approximation.

His playful use of heroic and poetic forms in unexpected contexts has perhaps its closest equivalent--in a visual form--in the old "Insider's Report" that Trader Joe's market (an institution once well-loved by Zib for its fine selection of wine and cheeses) used to produce, and now publishes in a more bowdlerized form as the "Fearless Flyer," or some such. The Trader Joe's newsletter clipped and pasted 19th century engravings of topical events--I seem to recall maritime disasters as a regular theme--into the unlikely context of grocery specials, and then applied silly captions and speech bubbles that undercut the dire depictions in the images. In the same spirit Zib would muster grandiloquence to describe the mighty beer-and-wurst fests in the Zetterberg's backyard.

Though the intention was strictly humorous and the tone gently mocking, enough of the essence of the original form--in the case of Trader Joe's the melodramatic engravings, in Zib's the rhetorical flummery--remained to invest their subjects with a certain cockeyed majesty. So when Zib wrote about the early cabin-builder generation of Nu Alpha Phi having been a Race of Titans, he was only half-kidding, and that mythical designation became the accepted account, to be burnished ever brighter with the passing generations.

Perhaps above all other things he has meant to us, Zib's most important role has been as our Epic Poet, our myth-maker. By singing the praises of the Nu Alpha Phi founders and forebears and their Golden Exploits, by wrapping his accounts of fraternity events, no matter how quotidian, in the mantle of poetical flourish, by serving as a bridge between the generations (usually requiring that the younger generations be awakened from a sound sleep), Zib has created an understanding of our shared past that undergird of our fraternity. No other group on the Pomona campus has ever had, or is ever likely to have, such great good fortune as we have enjoyed by calling Walter Wilhelm Zabriskie our own.

As I later learned more about his life, it came as no great surprise to me that he had been a tireless Sagehen yell-leader during his undergraduate days, or that he spent the latter part of his working life as a high-school principal. The elements of pep-squad enthusiasm and patient pedagogue are still to be seen in him. It is perhaps that combination of boundless energy and optimism coupled with an unusually subtle grasp of the adolescent (and older) mind that kept him slogging along with reluctant actives, wheedling and persuading them to achieve slightly more than they had ever expected from themselves (while showering them in Edwardian Verse).

Many a man called worthy would have thrown up his hands in disgust and dismay, but Zib kept at it for over twenty years and successfully spanned the gulf between the "traditional" and "progressive" elements in the fraternity (to say nothing of "older" and "younger" or "alum" and "active").

So it is only fitting that Zibby, encomiast of Nu Alpha Phi, should be the subject of this tribute edition, the result (as all of you excepting Zib himself must know) of a year's worth of subterfuge and circumvention to keep the requests for contributions out of Zib's sight. In assembling this collection of fond anecdotes, it occurred to us that Zib has been long overdue for this sort of public celebration. It has only been his close relation to the Oak Leaf that has prevented its realization before now. In his modesty he would have surely squelched any effort to laud him.

Several years ago when I was assembling the special edition devoted to the great, departed Agee Shelton, Zib related a wonderful, offhanded observation that beautifully summed up the vital differences between the two men, one of whom was the great reasoning mind and the other the great brimming, beating heart of Nu Alpha Phi.

Zib was explaining how Agee--whose singing ability was the stuff of legend--rendered the fraternity hymn flawlessly, but to his mind incorrectly. "Oh, he sings it beautifully," remarked Zib, "but he sings the derned thing like a dirge!" And by way of demonstration he rolled his eyes sorrowfully heavenward and produced a lovely, slow, plangent rendition of the hymn: "Allllllll haiiiiillllll to thee Nuuuuuu Aaaaal-pha Phiiiiiii, riiiiiiise uuuup ye mennnnn aaaaaaaand sinnnggggggg..."

He broke off and his gaze rolled level to meet mine. "Now I think it should go more like this--" and with his blue eyes flashing fire he sailed into a jaunty, allegrissimo version of the hymn as a classic fight song, which I imagine is the way he has always imagined it, with his arms and legs going in time at a steady quick march--"All HAIL! To thee NU AAL-PHA PHI! Rise UP! ye men and SIIING!" He carried it through all the way to the "honor and the glory" part at the closing, and I was helpless, swept along with the unrestrained ebullience, hearing it less as devotional prayer than as a robust, blood-stirring call to action, which is the moment I began to love the song.

That is my second Zabriskie moment, and undoubtedly my favorite.