KZ from A to Z
By Bill Kauffman

[Editor's note: The following is not approved by TAE, sanctioned by responsible authority, blessed by any sensible holy person, or fact-corrected in a journalistic-ally respectable way. It is merely a personal outpouring for which the editor returns embarrassed thanks and love. --KZ]

A few things you may not know about Karl Zinsmeister, TAE's outgoing editor in chief:

--Karl rowed for Yale's college champion crew team. He was quoted in Sports Illustrated grunting.

--At the Henley Regatta prize ceremonies, Karl sneaked a water pistol onto the platform and tried to squirt royal English personages.

--Karl and Ann, his lovely wife, fell in love in a Tanzanian prison. They were in Africa as part of a corps of idealistic young persons building a school--though not, as you will guess, the Peace Corps. Karl wandered out of camp with Ann on a sightseeing lark. They crossed the border into Marxist Tanzania. Perhaps due to his unfashionable military-like haircut, Karl was arrested by Tanzanian police as a spy. He and Ann spent four unsettling days in the hoosegow before Julius Nyerere's finest determined that he was merely a college kid with a poor sense of direction. She married him anyway.

--Karl lived in such squalor while rehabbing a house in southeast Washington, D.C. that the humane society denied his request to adopt a dog from the pound.

--With his usual bullheadedness, Karl adopted an abused dog from a classified ad instead.

--He has hated TV, and avoided owning one, for his entire adult life.

--He teaches Sunday School.

--He is a patriot of Syracuse, New York, and might have played basketball for his hometown Orangemen if only his range extended beyond the lay-up.

--His son, Will, is both the best three-point shooter and best dunker on the Clarkson University basketball team.

--He has exploited his photogenic children Kate and Noah as cover models for TAE--and paid them far below union scale.

--Whenever the TAE staff descended upon an American city on a journalistic sojourn he put us up in the cheapest hotel available. We stocked up on the donuts at continental breakfast time.

--Karl is the closest thing to fearless one can find outside the mental hospital. He always insisted on visiting the most crime-ridden, burned-out sections of a city, and aspersions were cast on the manhood of any editor who did not follow. I expect he rather enjoyed Baghdad.

--He loves theater and bluegrass music and is blissfully innocent of any knowledge of pop music, though I once saw him burst several forehead veins while singing along with John Cale dropping into the Kremlin on "Ready for War."

--Karl can rebuild a car engine but I doubt very seriously if he knows how to tie a tie. Next time you see him holding forth on TV, remember: it's a clip-on.

--He is a gardener who grows (and eats) kale voluntarily.

--Though a Yalie, he disdains pretension, haughtiness, and the putting on of airs. He made it a point to hire editors with offbeat backgrounds and non-traditional resumes. Karl is a populist: the only social distinctions that matter to him are based on character and talent.

--Karl worked 80-hour weeks on this magazine. He put his heart and soul and sweat and passion into it. He bled into its pages. For the past dozen years, The American Enterprise has reflected, even embodied, Karl Zinsmeister.

--Scott Walter, TAE's senior editor from 1994-2001, marvels at Karl's "staggering energy and endurance" and writes that "Karl, the great man of action, had wonderful tolerance for an odd man of theory like me, and I never expect to work as well or as happily as I did during those years."

--Karl is a grand friend and I thank him for 12 years of this space. Peace and happiness to all.