How the state's loudest typing newspaper editor changed Arizona

Earl Zarbin might have been a furniture mover. That was his first job after his discharge from military service in 1950.

But a pain in his chest while carrying a 400-pound stove up three flights of steps revealed pericarditis, a swelling and irritation near the heart.

His doctors advised: “Send this kid to college.”

Seven decades later, Zarbin’s legacy now counts six books, including the history of the first 100 years of The Arizona Republic, 35 boxes of historical manuscripts and notes donated to the Arizona State Library and Archives.

Zarbin made newsroom icons better

It includes years as a careful newspaper editor and reporter, a historian and part-time representative for the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, where he worked alongside towering figures in Arizona water.

Or his landscaping prowess on his acre home, where he lived for 47 years in south Phoenix. This followed a brief stint on the Madison Elementary School District Governing Board.

Or his bouncing prowess on a dance floor. His engaging flair for poetic four-line limericks.

Colleagues in The Republic newsroom remember him as a solid copy editor, who handled the work of newsroom icons like Jack West, Al Sitter and Don Bolles, whose investigative stories were strengthened by Zarbin’s usually careful hand.

Zarbin was nothing if not a stickler for accuracy. Indeed, he still winces about a mistake that crept in “Two Sides of the River,” in which he identifies John McCain as “Senator” when at the time McCain was still an Arizona congressman.

In a newsroom at the time full of “characters,” Zarbin was considered a nice fellow but a bit crusty, sharp in conversation. At times, he could raise his voice. But as Chuck Kelly observed: “Earl was an opinionated guy, but he didn’t thrust his ideas (Libertarian) on others.”

He also was known as the loudest typist in the place, slamming those keys like a jackhammer.

Somehow, he defused this fight

Local author and former Republic staffer Paul Perry recalls an incident from the early 1970s. The charismatic Native American activist Russell Means was in town. And on this Sunday morning, the activist was itching for a fight.

Means, a strapping bear of a man with long black hair worn in braids, strode into a mostly empty newsroom, in an era before security guards blocked entrance into most offices.

Means carried an 8x10 sheet of paper in which had written a letter, protesting a newspaper column criticizing the American Indian Movement. He demanded a retraction. And insisted that his words be placed in the exact same spot, on the same page as the offending article.

Journalists of a bygone era heard this complaint all the time.

Means, who once led a 71-day standoff with federal agents at Wounded Knee, S.D., on this day faced off with Earl Zarbin, an assistant city editor manning the desk.

No higher-ups in management in sight. 

Zarbin calmly explained the newspaper truism. “It doesn’t work that way.” That sheet of paper, those written lines, can’t fit on to a printed page.

Zarbin’s patient demeanor and calm logic must have carried the moment. Russell Means and the incident never made it into “All the Time a Newspaper,” published in 1990, considered Zarbin’s landmark achievement.

He pushed for better water coverage

Like so many paths Zarbin’s life had taken, the book didn’t spring out of a specific plan.

His furniture moving days ended, and he attended the University of Arizona in Tucson. His first choice didn’t work out. “I am,” he says, “a total failure as a fiction writer.”

He took a job as librarian at The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. Then became an obituary writer before becoming the night police beat reporter.

He arrived in Phoenix and The Arizona Republic in 1958.

Not long afterwards, Zarbin, the meticulous editor with an eye for big-picture coverage, became dissatisfied with the way reporters were writing about water. “Reporters seemed more interested in catching officials doing something nasty than in covering the news,” he said.

“It was Arizona in the 1970s, the state was growing and I wondered to myself where all the water was going to come from. Water issues were never covered indifferently. Finding solutions always has been the problem.”

“Without water, you can’t live. That’s Number One.”

Except for the legislative passage of the 1980 Groundwater Management Act and the advance of the Central Arizona Project, water issues were covered only sporadically in the decades to come.

Zarbin's history will be remembered

But by then, Zarbin was off on what would become his signature project, writing about the first 100 years of the state’s major newspaper.

“While I was still writing for the newspaper, I realized that the centennial was coming up by 1990. I started collecting information about the newspaper, its founding, early history ... Luckily, I got to write it.”

The book traces the first 100 years of the newspaper, evolving from frontier days to a modern, professional newspaper covering the news of the city, state and world to its readers.

It has it all. In 1890, Phoenix counted 3,152 souls and was without a paved street, except for crushed granite. Arizona was governed as a territory.

The most prominent resident, Dwight Heard, who became publisher in 1912, laid out the mission. The newspaper, he promised, “will work for the uplifting of the whole territory. The friend of Arizona will be our friend. Her enemy will be ours.”

For most of his career, Zarbin worked under Publisher Eugene C. Pulliam, whose sense of civic progress was not too dissimilar to Heard’s.

Pulliam was also a tough-minded publisher. “You did it Gene Pulliam’s way,” according to Zarbin.

But the centennial history was well received. Former Governor and popular radio personality Jack Williams offered a prescient quip: “You will be remembered!”

The whimsical limericks don’t come so easily these days. Nor the hours in his garden, where he and his late wife, Dorothy, planted fig, peach, apricot, lemon, blood orange and persimmon trees, grape vines and okra among other vegetables.

But for a guy who just happened in to historical writing, his will be a well-earned epitaph.

Richard de Uriarte served on The Arizona Republic editorial board for close to two decades and was the paper's ombudsman. Reach him at richdeu@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Earl Zarbin, charismatic editor and historian, changed Arizona