In the summer of 1977 my best friend and double cousin, Jim Hawkinson, and I (we were in the early stages of high school) were making prank phone calls. Somehow we came up with the idea of calling all the Zimmermans listed in the Sunnyvale/Los Altos/Mountain View white pages. Reading from a script, we identified ourselves as either Al or Bob Zimmerman, and stated that we were organizing a Zimmerman Family Potluck picnic to be held at a nearby park (Cuesta in Mountain View), at a specified time and date. Our proposal met with enthusiastic responses from all the Zimmermans we could contact, and to the best of our knowledge new Zimmerman family ties were cemented while long lost family members were welcomed back into the flock. The Zimmerman family grew many fold that day we think

​

-Tim Hawkinson, as related on April 24, 2024.