This One’s For Dinny

One of my dearest friends, Dinny Zimmerman, passed away this week, leaving a tear – and a tear – in my universe. 

Dinny could have easily been a Quaker because he was never afraid to speak truth to power. Actually, his integrity sometimes was his undoing, unfortunately. He worked in publishing most of his career after graduating from Penn, and lost several good jobs because he wouldn’t roll over or knuckle under to creeps who wanted him to go against his well-developed sense of truth. He wouldn’t lie for anybody and as the publishing industry changed from what had once been a gentleman’s calling to the profit-driven sham of today, Dinny got caught in the switch more than once.

I hadn’t seen Dinny since high school, where we were both on a championship tennis team, and at a dinner when we were inducted into the school’s Sports Hall of Fame, we sat next to each other and found out that we had a great deal in common and knew several people in common. Dinny, it turns out, was a friend of Abby Hoffman’s, and actually had published Abby’s “Steal This Book” back in the day, and I had been heavily involved in the so-called “underground” press, so our table conversation swirled and whirled and the more we found out about each other, the closer we became.

Dinny’s given name was actually “Ravdin,” his father having named him after a medical doctor at the University of Penn’s hospital. 

When we became reacquainted, Dinny was living in New Hampshire where he had become very successful in the publishing niche that included “The Farmer’s Almanac” and the kind of mags that are found at supermarket checkouts. He traveled a great deal, as I had when I became involved with the trade press, and that was another commonality, as we talked about the cool places we had been.

Dinny was a baseball addict, and had collected a whole houseful of baseball memorabilia, which I marveled at when I made my first trip to New Hampshire. The highlight was a Red Sox game at the legendary Fenway Park, Dinny living about an hour from Boston.

For several years after that, two other high school friends and I would journey to New Hampshire each summer to see Dinny and take in a Red Sox game. 

As health and age prevailed, the trips stopped, but Dinny and I stayed in constant phone contact, and after the travesty of the Trump victory and the start of these columns, Dinny became my biggest fan, calling regularly to compliment me and totally agree. He was, if anything, even more of a Donald Detester than I am. 

Donald Trump provoked Dinny’s deep sense of true patriotism and integrity, and our phone talks were refreshing and renewing for both of us, and that’s something I’m going to sorely miss. Dinny was politically canny and well-informed, and I learned a lot from him in addition to sharing mutual anti-Trump rants, some serious, many totally hilarious. Dinny had a very well-developed sense of irony and humor, both sorely needed in these strange and perilous times.

So this one’s for you, pal. R.I.P.