19-year-old loved autos and driving, died in car crash
It was one of those gloriously goofy … things … that can make a guy a high school legend, right then and there.
Zach Lambert hadn’t said anything for several seconds at lunch that day, which was quite uncharacteristic.
After all, this was a guy who could reduce whole cafeteria tables to guffaws, with his humor.
He did, however, give his patented grin, the one with the colorful description that can’t be printed in this newspaper.
The one he always delivered with a downward cast of his chin and his eyes looking up a you at the same time — thus signifying that some (good-natured) mayhem might be showing up on the instrument panel soon.
“Be right back.”
His University High buddies began nudging one another: “What’s Zach doin’?”
“I don’t know,” Nick Azzaro answered, “but it’s gonna be good.”
Forking it over
They watched, as the lanky Lambert began hitting up tables.
To collect spoons.
Every spoon, at every table, in fact.
By the time he was done, his backpack was brimming over with the pre-fab, plastic bounty.
And when he triumphantly poured them onto the table where he himself had just been eating lunch, pre-legend, the sound the avalanche of utensils made was equally glorious.
Sort of like the sound of that questionably legal glasspack muffler on your granddad’s Shelby Mustang, even.
Emily Post herself may have floored it to get out of there, but the Spoon Collector hung in, for his own burnout in the staging area.
Azzaro, who turned his tassel with his friend at UHS last year, recalled the moment with a grin of his own.
“The teachers,” he said, “weren’t too happy about it.”
Cool cars, warm friendship
Zach collected friends like he did spoons.
And on a golden Sunday that looked like a summer’s day while carrying an autumnal tang of thermometer at the same time, several rolled into a parking area behind Suncrest Towne Centre, to honor his memory.
The 19-year-old lost his life in a car crash near Morgantown last week.
It was poignant, both for his youth and for the fact that he loved cars and loved driving.
He was going to make both a career, in fact.
Lambert was readying to cruise onto the campus of the University of Northwestern Ohio, to begin study in that school’s acclaimed High Performance Motor Sports major.
Graduates almost always go on to work on NASCAR pit crews and with professional drag racing teams.
Zach was car-crazy, an apprentice gearhead who went to car meets across the region most weekends with his dad, Chris Lambert, who passed along his love of wrench-turning.
Lambert, the younger, was always under the hood of his Subaru Impreza, tweaking and modding, and tweaking some more.
Subaru is generally the vehicle of choice for Street Speed Automotive, the car club of which Zach was a member.
Some of the rides Sunday looked straight outta anime.
They were laden with graphics and carbon fiber accessories and powder-coated this and that on their outsides.
On their insides, the engines weren’t above throwing an internal-cumbustion, after-market temper tantrum or two, when coaxed by their owners.
The club is hardly formal, said Morgan Boyles, who helped organize the gathering.
“We’re basically just a bunch of friends with cool cars,” she said.
Community of Zach
Zach’s funeral service was the day before in Davis, Tucker County. The family is in the mountains.
Morgantown is the home of his car family, and his work family and his UHS family.
Those three branches were well-represented at the memorial cruise.
Matt Ferguson, who worked with him at Kroger in Suncrest Towne Centre, said his friend had just turned in his two weeks’ notice and already had his psyche steered in the direction of Ohio and school.
If personality could be translated into horsepower, Ferguson said, then Zach would have broken the sound barrier each time off the line.
“He never had a bad day, and you never had a bad day if you were around him. People appreciated Zach.”
The people Sunday appreciated the story about the cafeteria spoons — especially those hearing it for the first time.
As Ferguson said, they appreciated his personality.
They chuckled over his unconditional love of the menu at Waffle House and his penchant of always appearing in public as a Sharp-Dressed Man.
Just like the ZZ Top video, with the girls and the hot rod.
Hitting the ‘like’ button
Chris Lambert, attending his first car meet in years without the physical presence of his son, was also dressed accordingly.
“What do you think?” he asked, showing off his unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt over a T-shirt proclaiming his son’s “spoon god” legend (hashtag included) at UHS.
“Let me show you something else.”
Mr. Lambert proferred his cellphone, dialed to his Facebook page.
He began scrolling the messages, from when the news broke of the accident, to the funeral in Tucker County, to the car meet Sunday.
It took a while.
The elder Lambert lingered over the final, most recent one of that day.
The author of post detailed the friendship. How she never knew anyone like him before.
And how it would be impossible to not love the guy, for his inherent goofiness, but mainly for his heart.
As the Subaru hoods popped like flowers in bloom, as the three-chord rock ‘n’ roll proclaimed itself and the beats dropped via Rockford Fosgate systems, and as no less than two video-wielding drones captured it all from above … a dad gave a little smile.
And again looked at the post.
“That’s my son,” he said.
“That’s Zach.”
