Zibby Mag

We gather every year in his memory; he’s kept our old friendships alive after all this time

By Jill Fordyce

The last time I saw Fred was a few months after we’d graduated from college. He’d come to visit me before leaving on a trip to Europe. We’d finally gone our separate ways after being in school together from fourth grade all the way through the University of Southern California. That night, we went to a dive bar and then a one-man play about the life of Jack Kerouac. We talked until we fell asleep in my tiny studio apartment. In the morning, he told me to keep the Bob Dylan and Tom Petty concert tickets we bought together for summer, and that I should take my boyfriend. I imagine that I walked him out to the parking lot and we hugged goodbye, but the truth is, I don’t remember the goodbye. I’ve tried hard to remember it, but somehow that moment is gone.

I’ve often wondered if he knew he wasn’t coming back, and that was why he drove four hours to see me for one night. I never thought it would be the last time I would see him, hold on to his skinny frame, hear his ridiculous laugh.

A few years later, I received a phone call from Fred’s best friend telling me that Fred had died that morning in Amsterdam of complications from AIDS. Fred never told me he was sick, and the loss was sudden and shocking. We had landlines back in 1992, and I remember days of standing in my kitchen, holding my one-year-old daughter on my hip, the phone in the crook of my neck, crying and talking to our friends and classmates, trying to understand. He was only 29. How could he be gone? How did none of us know?

As the years flew by, I’d often think of Fred. I held his memory close. Brilliant, hilarious, and daring in our youth, I wondered who he would’ve been at 40, 50, now almost 60. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. In 2013, twenty years after his passing, our childhood friend, Ann, reached out to me and said she’d been thinking of Fred and asked if I would help start a scholarship in his honor. I loved the idea. Together, we created the Fred Zulfa Memorial Scholarship Fund at West High School in Bakersfield, California, where Ann, Fred, and I graduated from in 1982. We decided the scholarship should be reflective of Fred, and we would select students with ambition and heart—and a story to tell. In honor of Fred’s love of music and film, we asked applicants to write essays about their favorite song lyrics and a movie character that inspires them. In the first year, we each kicked in enough to fund one $500 book scholarship.

West High School was built in 1965 and its style is reflective of that time period—lime green octagon-shaped buildings that merge together, forming quads where students gather. During the years we attended West High, it was a so-called “neighborhood school that served the city’s middle to upper-class families.” Due to the city’s growth and district boundaries being redrawn, the school’s demographics are much different now. The current student population reflects much more racial and economic diversity than it once had, as well as an at-risk population. Approximately 91% of the students are eligible for the federal Free or Reduced Lunch Program. In the 2021-22 school year, 63 students were homeless.

Ann and I didn’t know any of this back in 2013 when we decided to create the scholarship. But reading the students’ essays and scholarship applications in that first year, we had glimpses of what we did not yet understand. Namely, while the octagon buildings and quads remained, the needs of the student body had changed markedly. We learned that many students held jobs to help support their families while attending school, and that some already had their own young families to support. In the column for “expected family contribution” to college tuition, most wrote nothing. When we naively asked applicants to attach their senior photos, we realized that very few could pay for senior photos. I remember one application, where the page for “extracurricular activities” was blank and the applicant wrote that he’d like to be on the soccer team, but he works a 40-hour week at Long John Silver’s. Another applicant talked about disappointing his parents and hoping to do better for his infant daughter.

Approximately 91% of the students are eligible for the federal Free or Reduced Lunch Program. In the 2021-22 school year, 63 students were homeless.

Choosing recipients was nearly impossible. There were so many bright, ambitious, hardworking students without funds for college, though they were college-bound despite the odds. We knew the scholarship had to grow. We brought on our childhood friend Andrea, and Fred’s brother, David, a local judge. David suggested holding an annual fundraising dinner in Bakersfield. Ann, Andrea, and I hadn’t lived in Bakersfield in over thirty years and were worried whether we even knew enough people or had enough local connections to pull that off. Our fears were allayed, because it seemed that no one had forgotten Fred.

The fundraising dinner has become an annual event that continues to grow each year. During that weekend, many of Fred’s former classmates—myself included—head back into town to catch up. Held at Luigi’s, a legendary Bakersfield restaurant, the tables are filled with new family members and old friends. The new recipients and their families are introduced. David talks about his brother. Ann and Andrea never sit down. The West High principal speaks with great pride about all the school is achieving, and she always talks directly to the scholarship recipients about the concept of legacy, what it means to receive a scholarship in someone’s memory.

The scholarship has resulted in camaraderie, connection, and generosity that I never anticipated. Many of us had moved away and lost touch—both with each other and our high school. The scholarship brought us back to each other’s lives in a meaningful way. My childhood friendship with Ann and Andrea opened a new chapter in the present day. Our classmate Mark, who lives in New York, asked people to donate to the scholarship in lieu of wedding presents. David and Kristi, high school sweethearts who started their own successful engineering business in town, were among our first sponsors. Wendy, who lives in Florida, dug up a photo she had of Fred in the classroom in the 1980s wearing a green Izod shirt. It has become our banner. My sister donates her angel sculptures and paintings every year to our auction; Ann’s dad donates his homemade wooden bowls; Andrea’s daughter donates her pottery. My cousin, Tim, arranged for us to receive a $10,000 grant. Fred’s two brothers, their wives, and the nieces and nephews he never got to meet all work the event. His mother is there, too. The one-year-old daughter I held close in the days after Fred’s passing attends the dinner every year with her husband.

To date, we have given out over $185,000 in scholarships. In 2023 alone, we awarded $50,000. There were over 200 people at the dinner this year, including several past recipients, one of whom was Alyssa, a 2018 recipient. At the time she was awarded her scholarship, Alyssa had been living in poverty, in a home with eleven others, sleeping on an air mattress. She’s now a college graduate, the first in her family, and her experience inspired her to work as a college readiness advisor, helping low-income and first-generation college students find a way to pay for college. In her scholarship application, she’d written about lyrics from a Queen song. In addition to inspiring her perseverance, the lyrics were also a powerful memory of her deceased father. That song triggered a memory for me, too. I remembered being in high school, driving around in Fred’s car while he sang along.

I often wonder how Fred would feel being honored in this way. I hope he’d relish being the reason so many of us gather each year, awed by the friendships that have grown from our connection with him. I know he would be heartened by the students whose lives he’s touched. Each year we check in with past recipients. When asked what it meant to receive the scholarship, the recipients always say that is that it is more than the just the money. It is that someone picked them and believed in them for nothing more than who they expressed themselves to be.

I think Fred would love that.

Jill Fordyce was born and raised in Bakersfield, California. She received a degree in English from the University of Southern California and a law degree from Santa Clara University. While practicing law, she continued to study writing through the Stanford Continuing Education creative writing program. Belonging (Post Hill Press, January 30, 2024) is her debut novel. She and her husband, Craig, have five children, and live in California and Tennessee. Learn more about Jill and Belonging at http://www.jillfordyce.com.