Dori: Why did SDOT Director Sam Zimbabwe change his last name?

This is a story that we broke as an exclusive from one of our listeners. Sam Zimbabwe was recently named as head of the Seattle Department of Transportation.

I must admit, when I first heard that someone with the last name of Zimbabwe was white, I was surprised.

But then a listener told me that Sam Zimbabwe changed his last name somewhere between 2007 and 2011. We asked SDOT about it and they said that it’s interesting, but because it’s a personnel matter and not related to his job, they did not at first want to answer my questions.

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Who was the first person in the media to tell you about the incompetence and corruption of Scott Kubly, Zimbabwe’s predecessor at SDOT? It was our show. My antenna is up a little. And I wanted to know, why would someone change their name from Sam Zimmerman-Bergman to Sam Zimbabwe?

I think that he did it because the name ‘Sam Zimbabwe’ sounds cool. And in Seattle and Washington, D.C., where he was before, sounding cool is more important than being great. It’s all about an image.

So we started looking into it more over the weekend. People pointed out that Sam’s wife also had a hyphenated last name, Bindwell-Wendover. One listener suggested that the couple might have taken letters from each of these names — Zim, B (with an added ‘a’), B, We — to make a totally new name.

What’s even odder about this is, at the time he apparently picked Zimbabwe as his new last name, the country of Zimbabwe was being ruled by murderous dictator Robert Mugabe. Mugabe was cited for human rights violations. He used Cold War-esque rhetoric, blaming Zimbabwe’s (the city, not the SDOT director) economic problems on capitalism in the West.

These are the questions I’d like to ask Sam Zimbabwe, the new SDOT director. We first submitted a request on Friday to speak with Sam on the air about this. If he comes on the show, we’ll be done with it. Or, I can keep looking into this, because even if someone doesn’t provide the answers, I’ll still ask the questions.

I hope that Sam comes on the show so that we can have a chat and clear up a few of my questions.

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