To the Editor:
I received a phone call from my old friend Zak, on the seventh of January, at almost the same minute that in another place the other man most intertwined with my time in Staples Players passed away quietly. He left us way too soon. He helped create my joyous teen years.
His name was Mr. Joseph W. Ziegahn. To the thousands of other students who loved him; myself especially, he was simply Ziegahn.
My mother once said that she received a good less headaches from me during high school because I was too busy studying stagecraft and doing backstage theater under the tutelage of Ziegahn to get into trouble.
It all started when I had him for seventh grade art class, then four years of Staples Players. Those four years shaped me. Like the clay on the wheel in his classroom he molded me. If any teacher could teach a student how to be a man, he was Ziegahn.
I am not a person of extravagant gratitude except when I finished high school and towards Ziegahn. To enumerate my gratitude for all Ziegahn did for me, I will tell about how I said goodbye to Staples Players.
I was 18 and I spent almost a month’s pay on a pewter knife engraved “THANKS JWZ, FROM DEA” as a surprise for him. The gesture was so that every time he used that tool to create art, he would remember how much he helped one crazy kid survive high school. He helped many kids survive high school or junior high in 39 years as a teacher.
I learned how to swing a hammer and build a table as well as be polite and talk to a lady from this man. I learned how to lift with my knees and not with back as well as how not to be afraid to ask a girl to prom. Ziegahn was from South Dakota and I married a girl from South Dakota. That’s only fair; he taught me (at 15) that the girls I wanted to talk to were just as nervous as I was.
Every day, every single day I think about all he taught me. I remembered that quite well the day I met my wife and the life lesson came back, I was a nervous 29 year-old and so was she. Mostly I’m impressed that Ziegahn could teach me all that and make me laugh.
I watched him one day, during our annual haunted house, transform me into Mr. Spock from Star Trek with less than $5 worth of makeup. I think Paramount could have used him. I watched him teach Zak about lighting, Lindsay about costumes and even a dozen of more my peers how to stage student productions.
In the more than 25 years he was technical director, he probably saw more than 10,000 students. I would bet most of us feel the same way, I apologize that it’s an old cliché but “we shall not see his like again.”
I called him two months ago, not to say ‘good-bye;’ but to say ‘thank you.’ I told him that everyone has one teacher they look back on as the one that influenced them the most and he was mine. For all this I am grateful.
For his quarter century, Ziegahn put in 14-hour days. Arriving in the workroom hours before school then running stagecraft alongside after school clubs or rehearsals. He’d then leave hours after us invariably. I went pre-K through 12 in Westport and I can tell you this, no one, no one in the education profession showed more caring or concern for students than Joe Ziegahn.
This is why I implore the powers that be to host a tribute to Ziegahn on the main stage at Staples High School. Drape the chair that bears his name with a curtain and ribbon like a ‘missing man formation’ gesture and let more than a quarter of a century worth of students that loved him fill that auditorium one last time. Not for me or what he did for me, but for of the thousands of other Westport students who loved him like I do.
Thank you.
David E. Arcudi
Vice President, Technical, Staples Players, 1995-6
Prop Master, Staples Players 1994-1996
Staples High School Alumnus, 1996
