Michael Kienitz
Leon Varjian at the 37th Pail and Shovel Party Convention on Library Mall, 1979.
I came to the UW at the height of the inspired student government leadership of the Pail & Shovel Party. A political science major, I thought Leon Varjian and Jim Mallon were the most brilliant politicians at any level of government at the time because they perfectly captured the absurdity of it all.
If you weren’t a political science major you may not have noticed that the art of politics has not been on a generally positive trajectory ever since.
Varjian’s pranks were the stuff of legend. We woke up one brilliant autumn morning to 1,000 pink flamingos on Bascom Hill and on a cold winter’s day to a partially submerged Statue of Liberty on Lake Mendota in front of the Memorial Union. The official line from P&S was that the party was making good on its promise to bring the statue to the Madison campus but it crashed through the ice while being towed across the lake. It wasn’t just a great use of papier-mâché; it came with a great story to back it up.
Varjian never actually got a piece of paper from the UW, but he embodied the place better than anyone — as much for what he did after he left as for what he did while he was here. Varjian eventually became a much-beloved high school math teacher in New Jersey. He was regarded as an excellent teacher and was recognized for it. He also got involved in volunteering in his community and encouraged his students to do so as well. He led an effort to honor a colleague who had died of cancer.
Varjian’s life was about rising above boredom. He had a whimsical and mischievous sense of humor and irony, and he worked hard at getting the joke just right. It’s exactly that combination of wry good fun, hard work and interest in the community that defines the UW and Madison when we’re at our best.
In a UW press release, Varjian is quoted as saying, “There isn’t a day that I don’t reach back to something I’ve experienced when I get up in front of a group, sometimes a hostile group, to give a presentation. You have to organize it all in advance. You have to have all your props, get people’s attention, do your show, and then when the show is over, you disappear. That’s teaching.”
Now, for his last act, Leon Varjian will disappear. He died this week of an apparent heart attack at the age of 64. But he taught us a lot. He reflected what’s best about this place back to us so that we could appreciate it better. May he rest in pink flamingos.
