THUS SPAKE ZIMMERMAN : Prolific Letter Writer and Others Like Him Let Editors--and the Public--Know What They Think

Noteworthy letters to the editor:

I am eight years old. . . . Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus? --Virginia O’Hanlon, 8,

to the New York Sun in 1897.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. --Mark Twain, 62,

to the Associated Press in 1897. Even though no U.S. citizen would want our country to be taken over by an outside force, after watching the mini-series “Amerika” probably few Americans would seriously object to the Soviets taking over ABC in an effort to improve the network’s movie-making abilities. --Kenneth L. Zimmerman, 41,

to American Film magazine in 1987.

In the past five months his name has appeared more often in the Los Angeles Times than the bylines of some of the newspaper’s own staff writers. During that period, about once every three days his opinions were published by a newspaper or magazine somewhere.

He doesn’t have an exalted title or hold sway with muckety-mucks or big wigs. He is just an everyday guy from Cypress with something to say and a knack for getting it published.

Meet Kenneth L. Zimmerman, man of letters.

When he was 16, Zimmerman wrote his first letter to the editor. A quarter-century later he has emerged as perhaps the most prolific, diverse and successful letter-to-the-editor writer in Orange County. If he isn’t, he is close.

Get a good grip on your opinion page and consider this: Since last year Zimmerman’s letters have appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, TV Guide, the Houston Post, the Sporting News, the Long Beach Press Telegram, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Diego Union, U.S. News & World Report, and American Film magazine--and he doesn’t even subscribe to a daily newspaper.

Zimmerman has written to comment on presidential politics, cold-blooded killers, football heroes, Supreme Court justices, a paraplegic Playboy centerfold, tall people, drug trafficking, coffee drinking at the cemetery, San Francisco street renaming, Spuds MacKenzie, the crisis in nursing, the alligator shoe industry, rock and roll--well, you get the idea.

“I don’t just write in for the sake of writing in; I have to be interested in something,” said Zimmerman, who apparently is interested in everything.

Although he has written letters to editors for years, it was only last fall that Zimmerman began his remarkable binge.

Since November in The Times alone, Zimmerman’s letters have been published in the Sports, Book Review, Orange County Life, Real Estate, View, Business, Television Times, Metro and Calendar sections, Los Angeles Times Magazine and even the once-a-week Ventura County section of the paper.

In one seven-day span in March, there were eight Zimmerman letters published in various sections of The Times.

“I know people at work who just read it (the newspaper) and they toss it away and that’s it,” he said with a perplexed shrug. “When I write, I’m more involved in an article; I feel I’m more a part of it.”

For Zimmerman, a man of boundless enthusiasm, the newspaper is his oyster and it is chock full of pearls.

“Every day you go through a paper there’s always something to write on because so many interesting things are happening.”

Nevertheless, Zimmerman (an analyst for the Long Beach Health Department when he is not writing to editors) is at a loss to explain his sudden outburst of unsolicited epistles, except to say: “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”

Ross Quillian, UC Irvine associate professor of social science, admits he doesn’t “know anything about letter writers, except what I read in the newspapers.” But Quillian has definite feelings about the contribution of people like Zimmerman.

“I spend my life trying to say how one would organize a media system if it were really done right,” Quillian said. “All communications ought to be from people who think they have something to say and send them in and get it accepted or not, in the way scientific journals are done. Scientific journals don’t hire reporters. In effect, all scientific journals are written by letter writers. That has very good results for society.”

Quillian concedes that his scheme is utopian “in that it isn’t going to be instituted tomorrow. But it’s not utopian in that I think it could work.

“If you did the whole thing that way, truth would emerge, or at least the best and most defensible views.”

The best and most defensible views. Noble aspirations, to be sure. Could that be the motivation behind letter-to-the-editor writing?

Let us ask Costa Mesa City Councilman David Wheeler, himself a frequent contributor to those columns in local newspapers.

“You gain immediate gratification and hopefully you contribute to the clash of ideas that will shape the future,” Wheeler said of letter writing. “That process is very important in the overall clash of ideas that results in the best idea prevailing.

“I think that ideas that are adopted and become part of our lives are usually initially debated by opinion makers, who generally include authors of letters to the editor, no matter how screwy their opinions might be. They still are the opinion makers. They take the time and the effort to wade through the thoughts and offer their own.

“I guess we should be thankful for those cranks who write every week,” said Wheeler, who estimates that he writes letters to the editor about eight times a year.

Retired carpenter Jim Bolding of Costa Mesa has been writing letters to editors of Orange County publications for 40 years. He said: “I’m more or less a conservative and a Republican and a Christian, so I write (along) the typical line for a conservative, Republican or a Christian. . . . I just get satisfaction. I never collected a dime for writing anything.

“I used to (keep copies) back to 1948. But the paper got to turning yellow so I threw them away and forgot about it.

“I used to write on the threat of communism back in the old days, but not so much these days. There’s a lot of other threats these days: drugs, immorality.”

Bolding’s letters occasionally prompt a response from a reader.

“I get dirty phone calls, ha ha ha ha, and dirty letters, ha ha ha ha,” chortled Bolding, obviously amused by the notion. “They don’t bother me. I always figure he (a dirty letter writer) is writing one person and I’m writing to a quarter million.”

Letter writer Gene Selig of Irvine has had difficulty getting responses to letters mailed to public officials.

“The last politician who answered me with regularity was John Kennedy; Reagan has never answered me,” complained Selig, a commercial photographer who at age 58 has been writing letters to politicians and newspapers for 40 years.

“I find when I write a direct letter to someone, either I don’t get an answer or the problem doesn’t seem important enough to that person,” he complained.

But Selig has better luck with newspapers, which acknowledge his commentaries by printing them. About once a week he writes to the Irvine World News and Orange Coast Daily Pilot, which he said use “75% of my stuff.”

Laguna Beach restaurateur Harry Moon has taken to identifying himself as a “Lagunatic” in his letters to the editor. An explanation is found, where else, in a letter to the editor (one of two from Moon that appeared on April 6 in the Orange Coast Daily Pilot):

“(la-gune-a-tick) n. 1. a sensitive individual often--but not necessarily--a resident of Laguna Beach . . . who is smitten by the charm and beauty of this village.”

Moon, who recently celebrated the “22nd anniversary of my 39th birthday,” feels it would be a “waste” if he didn’t share his ideas with others. But he also likes to see his efforts have some effect.

“I have been a problem solver most of my life and I like to think of myself in that terminology,” Moon said.

Even though newspapers declined to publish Moon’s letter urging a 75-cent rather than a dollar fee for local parking meters, “the City Council had it in their (agenda) packets and ended up charging six bits,” Moon boasted.

About a third of the letters he writes are published, Moon said. His secret for success? “I’ve adopted a pattern of trying to come up with a trite, old-fashioned expression, like ‘A buck no, six bits yes’ and ‘We can’t let the tail wag the dog.’ ”

But if you are looking for tips, an even better source may be the immensely successful Zimmerman, who estimates that he has had about 60 letters to the editor published in the past six months.

“You’ve got to get a person’s attention right away,” Zimmerman advised. “Long letters . . . are very dull. You don’t feel like reading them beyond the first sentence or two.

“It’s like any other form of mass media, you’ve got to get people’s attention. You’ve got to get them interested right at the beginning.”

In his letters, Zimmerman often quotes from popular songs or borrows an appropriate quotation from literature or history.

“It may sound kind of corny at times, but it gets its message across. Relating things like that, at least people can identify with it. I also try to say something original, if I can. I try to say something that maybe no one has said before or have an original idea that maybe no one has thought of.”

The first time another reader wrote to an editor to take exception to one of his letters, Zimmerman was shocked. He simply had urged a cemetery to reinstitute its practice of serving free coffee to New Year’s Eve motorists who had imbibed alcohol to excess.

“He (the complaining writer) said he was a bartender,” Zimmerman recalled. “He disagreed with me. He thought coffee gave them a false sense of security, like they were sober.”

On reflection, Zimmerman found it gratifying that he had stirred a debate. “If I hadn’t written a letter . . . he may never have written a letter expressing his view.”

Readership studies show the letters-to-the-editor page is one of the best-read features in newspapers. Like many others, veteran letter writer Moon turns there “long before I read the comics and the sports page.”

“It serves to communicate other viewpoints,” Moon said. “The success and failure of a lot of people is their ability to communicate or not communicate.”

There are many levels of communication within a mere letter to the editor, according to Wheeler, who insists he can read between the lines by focusing on adjectives and adverbs.

“The ones that contain emotional pleas and rhetoric are easily understandable with a reading of just the adjectives and adverbs,” he said. “I think if you lift out the adjectives and the adverbs they reveal the bias of the author.

“You can learn a lot about an author’s fears and aspirations. It’s often more interesting than what the author is trying to say.”

Wheeler, who is a lawyer, also has found that “putting your thoughts on paper is a process that tends to clarify and distill and expose faulty reason. You need the discipline of having to write your thoughts in order to see the fallaciousness of some of your arguments.”

Whatever the side effects and byproducts, Zimmerman is convinced that letters to the editor are healthy outlets.

“I think a lot of times letters . . . do have a lot of impact. They do make yourself heard. I think it’s very important to do that.”

One Zimmerman’s Opinion: ‘Bo Jackson Rates a 10 1/2’

Some of the best and maybe-not-quite-the-best of Kenneth L. Zimmerman, who may be the most prolific, successful and diverse letter-to-the-editor writer in Orange County (or at least in Cypress).

On the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s finding that Beverly Hills has physical and economic distress: “There must have been a recent influx of the . . . Beverly Hillbillies moving into Beverly Hills. . . . The alligator shoe industry could go belly up.”

--Los Angeles Herald Examiner

On TV trends in sex appeal: “It seems as if today’s women are more attracted to animals than they are to men. If it isn’t Spuds MacKenzie . . . then it’s Vincent, the half-human, half-lion-like creature of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ What do these animals have that we men don’t have?”

--The TV Times magazine

On female umpires: “What does a person’s gender have to do with being an umpire anyway? . . . All it requires is a keen eye, a sense of fairness, a truckload of patience and a sturdy right thumb, attributes both men and women possess.”

--Orange County Register

On Gary Hart’s decision to run again following the Donna Rice scandal: “Gary must have had a ‘Hart’ transplant, as he’s re-entering the Democratic presidential race. . . . I guess you could say he has paid the p(rice) for his errors through public humiliation.”

--St. Louis Post Dispatch

On a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding censorship of student newspapers: “If the same broad, sweeping guidelines for censorship . . . which takes into consideration such things as if an article is poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced or unsuitable for immature audiences were applied to adult-run newspapers, many would go out of business, as there would be little left to print.”

--San Diego Union

On the likelihood of an economic depression: “There has already been a stock market crash, farms have for several years been going under at an alarming rate, the worldwide economic situation is in a state of disarray, and a record number of smaller banks have failed. . . . Hard times are just around the corner.”

--Long Beach Press-Telegram

On a football star who decided to play professional baseball: “Bo Jackson is the most famous Bo since Bo Derek, but in my book he rates a 10 1/2.”

--Los Angeles Herald Examiner