It Happened Here -- Zim's Bandstand

One of the most endearing features of many small towns in upstate New York are their small parks and the well maintained bandstands that date from an era when most entertainments were homemade.

Eugene Zimmerman was born in Basel Switzerland in 1862. After his mother died, his father, a baker, and older brother emigrated to America and he was sent to live with relatives in French Alsace-Lorraine. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Eugene joined them in America.  Zimmerman loved to doodle and draw caricatures. He later claimed his first drawings were made in frosting on the cakes his father baked, in his Patterson, New Jersey bakery. The young man tried his hand at a wide variety of jobs.  A stint as a sign painter's apprentice was an important bridge to his future profession, bringing him to Elmira, New York. Meanwhile,  he continued to teach himself to become a cartoonist by copying the cartoons of others and by constantly drawing.    (A cartoon he would draw as a successful cartoonist is perhaps autobiographical.  It shows a young boy having been caught drawing a caricature on a horse stall in his barn by his father. It is grotesque and funny. His somewhat annoyed father asks him who is its subject. The boy stutters "B-ben H-harrison"(president).  It is obviously a caricature of his father.)

In 1883 Zimmerman put together a portfolio of his cartoons and went looking for a job in New York City.  He found one at Punch, a Democratic political magazine.  Since at least the early Enlightenment political cartoons had been an element in political discourse. A generation before, Thomas Nast had made the political cartoon a force in American politics. His cartoons of New York's Tammany Hall organization and its leader "Boss" Tweed were instrumental in bringing down the Democratic Party boss. Tweed was once quoted as saying "I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures."

Zimmerman, who began to sign his cartoons "Zim," worked for Punch for two and a half years until he heard of a new magazine in the works.  Judge would be both a magazine of political commentary and satire and of general social satire. It would have a Republican orientation, more in line with Zimmerman's personal political leanings; and with fewer cartoonists on staff and with a broader societal focus it would give "Zim" greater opportunities for expression.  It was a good fit and Zimmerman would work for Judge for twenty-five years, until he retired. Over his lifetime an incredible 40,000 of his drawings would be published.

In 1886 Zimmerman married Mabel Alice Beard of Horseheads¹, New York,  a town adjacent to Elmira.  Two years later he arranged with his editor to go to New York on alternate weeks, and to work from home on the other weeks.  The couple moved to a home next to Teal Park in 

Horseheads²

^{Though his work focused his attention on national politics and on the melting pot that was New York City in the last quarter of the 19th} century^{3,"Zim" threw himself into the life of the local community, serving as a village trustee, joining the Rotary Club and the local volunteer fire department and organizing a community brass band. From retirement he would write and illustrate several books about his region and his community:  Zimm's Foolish History of Elmira and its Tributaries,  Zim's Foolish History of Horseheads and two later editions of the Foolish History of Horseheads,} 

Teal Park. Horseheads

^{In 1910 "Zim" designed a band stand for his band.  Neither a Victorian wedding cake nor a neoclassical temple--designs favored in many community bandstands, Zim's bandstand has the feel of a spinning carousel; and to complete its whimsical feel, it sports a trio of grasshopper and frog musicians. The bandstand was dedicated in 1914.}

1Horseheads got its name when early settlers came upon a pile of horse skulls. At the end of the Clinton-Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, in 1778, before Continental army troops boarded their boats for the return trip down the Chemung River their worn out, surviving pack horses were butchered for their meat. It was the skeletal remains of these animals that the first settlers found.

2“Zim” was attracted to the quiet life and simple amenities of the small town of Horseheads but no doubt the name “Horseheads” appealed to his sense of whimsy as well.

3Today “Zim's” cartoons are sometimes criticized for their racial and ethnic stereotyping but as a leading caricaturist of what became known as the “grotesque” style cartooning all ethnic groups came under the attack of his pen. Favorite subjects also included “crackers.” smug rural white people, gathered around their public forum, the county-store cracker barrel, and “Jays,” rural whites lost and confused in the big city or blissfully unaware of its traffic patterns-the origin of the term “Jay-walkers.”