Steve Caballero
Skateboard Hero
Each time an airborne skateboarder spins 360 degrees before landing back on the pavement, one of Steve Caballero’s contributions to popular culture gets replayed. Caballero got his start in 1976 when skateboarding was being reinvented in the parched pools of drought-plagued San Jose. Sponsored by age 15 and turned pro in 1980, he racked up championship titles and aerial ramp records throughout the 1980s, inventing and perfecting the “Caballerial” skateboard trick at Winchester Skate Park in Campbell. A member of several San Jose punk bands, he’s also been a video game character, a Vans shoe promoter and an action figure.
David Kinch
Biodynamic Chef
Silicon Valley never had a celebrity chef until David Kinch. From the tiny Saratoga kitchen at Sent Sovi, a restaurant he opened in 1995, Kinch created an intensely personal cuisine that emphasized local farm-to-table ingredients and a Catalan twist on California cuisine. An ill-timed investment in post-dotcom Manresa in Los Gatos first proved a struggle. But the world began to notice that something was happening inside his industrial-quality kitchen and recognized him with two Michelin stars every year since 2006. Now godfather to an ecosystem of spinoffs by his protégés, the surfing chef culls ingredients from a 2-acre biodynamic farm in Ben Lomond run by owner Cynthia Sandberg.
Laurie Smith
Badge Lady
California’s first female sheriff broke up one of valley’s the oldest boys’ clubs and professionalized an organization that had been not long before managed by a cowboy boot-wearing, “aw shucks”–type of sheriff of the type seen in Coen Brothers movies (minus the gravitas). Budget overruns and mismanagement prompted county supervisors to remove the jails from the sheriff’s control and then appoint a replacement who was more of an administrator than a leader. The sheriff’s office today is fiscally sound, accessible and outfitted with new technology. Although she faces heated competition in the upcoming election, Smith has already served three terms and shut plenty of mouths.
Tom McEnery
Focused
Elected mayor at 37, Tom McEnery harnessed a financial mechanism engineered by a predecessor. He used it to transmogrify the decrepit remnants of the bustling downtown of his youth into an attractive spot for arts enthusiasts, conventioneers, concertgoers, transit riders and sports fans. Though housing and retail are still works in progress nearly three decades later, and the once-vibrant club scene has stumbled, today’s downtown is Valhalla compared to the mecca for sex workers that preceded it, a legacy to McEnery’s political skills and focused, single-minded vision.
Héctor García-Molina
Base are Belong
David Packard Jr.
Classic Act
Son and namesake of Hewlett-Packard’s co-founder, David Packard Jr. inherited a big shoes legacy. As a classics professor, and later as president of the Packard Humanities Institute, he developed software to preserve ancient inscriptions by digitizing them to a searchable database. While his sisters worked with the family foundation to save marine life and conserve threatened lands from Central California to South American rainforests, Packard Jr. brought two unique cultural resources to the downtowns of Palo Alto and San Jose. Thanks to him, the Stanford Theatre was reborn as a temple for classic film and San Jose has a gorgeous symphony and opera hall at the California Theatre.
Kathy Kolder
Retail Therapist
One of Silicon Valley’s quirkiest success stories is big-box pioneer Fry’s Electronics, which opened in Sunnyvale 25 years ago and today operates more than 30 stores. Kathy Kolder joined the three Fry brothers at the start, overseeing operational and legal matters as the executive vice president. “She was the only one who knew anything about selling,” one of the brothers admits. Privately held and headquartered in San Jose, Fry’s owns a PGA-ready golf course, is building a castle for its math institute and has been generous with local arts groups. Kolder’s command of the nuts-and-bolts is a big reason why unconventional ideas have succeeded at Fry’s.
John Sobrato
Full Tilt
Billionaire John Sobrato’s name these days shows up on buildings associated with his family foundation’s recent philanthropy. Before that, real estate signs blasted his name from industrial parks that lined the valley’s expressways. Perhaps more than any developer, Sobrato sculpted the face of Silicon Valley, giving physical form to the companies of Silicon Valley and creating homes for Amdahl, Cisco, Apple, Yahoo and many others. Sobrato Development today owns and manages almost 10 million square feet of commercial space, consisting of 100 buildings, including one in downtown San Jose built in the waning days of the dotcom boom that still awaits a single corporate tenant.
Bob Sillen
Hot Pistol
While the rest of the country tries to figure out what to do about the health-care problem, Silicon Valley is better than off than other places thanks largely to brash, big-mouthed Bob Sillen. While profit-hungry hospital chains abandoned inner cities and the elite flocked to hospitals in the West Valley and near Stanford, empire-building Sillen created the system for the rest of us. As head of Valley Medical Center and the Santa Clara Health and Hospital System until 2006, Sillen demanded and got financial accountability while expanding facilities and services.
Rod Diridon Sr.
Ticket to Rod
Transporation zealot Rod Diridon served two decades as county supervisor, during which he led the charge to expand rail service and improve the county freeway system. With a train station named for him, he could rest on his laurels, but Diridon is restless and going back for a second act. He’s been a leading proponent for California’s high speed rail system. If it goes as planned, the $45 million project will begin construction in two years and be operational in seven, allowing a 50-minute commute from Fresno to the valley, and placing Los Angeles two hours away. Vegas, anyone?
Fil Maresca
Couched
Club operator Fil Maresca brought global nightclub culture to San Jose with the Oasis and F/X, fusing theater with subcultures and allowing San Jose to shake off its big-haired heavy metal days. Concluding that the redevelopment-mandated “Market Gateway” appellation wouldn’t resonate, Maresca and promoter Gary Walker suggested calling South First Street the SoFA District. We liked the idea too and conspired in the guerrilla effort to take back the street. An alternative club culture grew and today downtown has a well-branded district of galleries and arts-related businesses.
Tony Fadell
Father Pod
Steve Jobs gets the credit and Jon Rubinstein got the job piloting Palm, but Tony Fadell is probably the one most responsible for creating the iPod. The stylish MP3 player begat the iPhone and iPad, revitalized the recorded music industry, helped the valley assume consumer products leadership and signal its arrival with funky billboards. Fadell led the team of 35 designers and engineers who created the breakthrough product that saved Apple, whose policy doesn’t permit anyone other than designated spokespeople to talk to the press. If the world knew Tony Fadell’s name, they would thank him.
Scott Knies
Association Exec
Hired to run a small business association operated from a folding table in Metro’s office, Scott Knies understood the potential. Working with a band of upstarts in their late 20s and a thirtysomething lawyer named Chuck Reed, the group cobbled together a business improvement district and launched Music in the Park. Today, the San Jose Downtown Association operates an Ice Rink and a street maintenance district and influences a wide range of downtown policies. Still at the helm, Knies was instrumental in forging better relations between his alma mater, San Jose State, and the downtown business community.
Wiggsy Siversten
Rights Stuff
The co-founder, with Ken Yeager, of the LGBT political action group BAYMEC, Wiggsy Sivertsen took a pragmatic approach to issues of interest to same-sexers. Focusing on the universal theme of fighting discrimination against all communities, the SJSU counselor says, “If we had been confrontational, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.” Over the past quarter century, Silicon Valley’s gay and lesbian community has gone from nearly invisible to one whose endorsement is sought by just about anyone who entertains serious hopes of getting into any prominent local political office.
Bill Johnson
Survivor
The longest surviving community publisher standing, the former press secretary to Congressman Pete McCloskey launched the Palo Alto Weekly in 1979 as an alternative to the now-buried Peninsula Times Tribune daily. Bill Johnson’s weekly became the first newspaper to in the country to post all of its content for free on the World Wide Web (“I barely knew what it was,” he confesses) after a reader volunteered to build the paper’s website at no charge. Like Metro, which started six years later, the Weekly resisted the urge to sell during the free press heyday and remains owned by community investors rather than a corporate parent.
Barry Swenson
Builder
Barry Swenson was squeezed out of the family business, the Carl N. Swenson company, which built San Jose’s old City Hall. Left on his own, and not enjoying status as one of the Redevelopment Agency’s favored developers, Swenson nonetheless bought up downtown blocks in San Jose, as well as Santa Cruz and other California communities, rehabilitating historic buildings one by one. His restorations of the New Century Block of First Street and the De Anza Hotel, which was built by his grandfather, helped give San Jose some of its battered soul back. A longtime proponent of high-density housing, he also built downtown’s first residential tower, City Heights. Barry Swenson Builders is now one of the largest privately owned companies in the valley.
Amy Dean
Pulling Strings
While still in her 20s, Aimee Dean crafted a political strategy to build labor strength in a valley whose manufacturing workforce viewed unions as rust bucket relics. By 30, she had taken over the South Bay Labor Council, and not long thereafter, the San Jose City Council via elected proxies. Benefiting from millions raised through a 501c3, labor allies still control a council that must now weigh the high cost of public employee salaries. Cindy Chavez now runs the union group, while Dean moved to Chicago.
Ken Yeager
Door Opener
Ken Yeager has been opening political doors since he became a trustee of San Jose Evergreen Community College District in 1992, then San Jose city councilman, a county supervisor and now president of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Yeager came out of the closet in a 1984 Mercury News op-ed piece that struck back at a previous piece by a local assemblyman who called homosexuality “wrongful.” Yeager proved critics wrong by becoming the first openly gay man to hold the four offices he’s held. Winning broad respect as a thoughtful and approachable legislator, Yeager showed that competence, not sexual preference, carries the day even in a region more socially conservative than other parts of the Bay Area counties.
Ron Gonzales
Mixed Mayor
Though Ron Gonzales’ political career was derailed by personal and political scandal before he could run for governor, he left his mark on the valley as county supervisor and mayor of both Sunnyvale and San Jose, where he oversaw an era of building schools, community centers, parks, libraries—and a massive City Hall. The cost of those amenities weighs heavily today on the municipal treasury, along with the public employee compensation legacy of that era. The buildings, more adventurous and contemporary architecturally than the ones erected under Redevelopment’s Frank Taylor, whom Gonzales ousted, will no doubt prove their utility over time.
Bill Graham
Big Tent
Though he’s no longer with us and didn’t live or keep an office here, Bill Graham’s imprint remains to this day. Building what many artists regard as the finest outdoor facility of its class on the national touring circuit, Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View put the valley on the concert stage, from which geography-challenged bands scream “San Francisco” less frequently these days. For many years the home base of the Grateful Dead, Shoreline has brought top performers together for Neil Young’s Bridge Show for two magical decades, and the facility became an anchor of the industrial campus cluster that’s now home to Google.
Harry Whoo, Julius Papp, Rick Preston
Better living through Electronics
What would Silicon Valley be without an electronic music scene? If we were born to strum acoustic guitars, it’d be Acoustic Valley. Three DJs pretty much built the dance music scene in the late1980s and early 1990s: Rick Preston, (center) Julius Papp (left) and Harry Whoo (right). The three turntablists teamed up for a party called Soul’d Out, which started at F/X and later moved to Hamburger Mary’s. Preston and Whoo (who vended vinyl at Solid Grooves records until 2004 and now photographs weddings) reunited for KZSU’s Slap! Party last summer. Papp and San Jose veteran Miguel Migs have kept the party going with Salted in San Francisco, which we dare not call the city.
Kathleen Powell, Halfdan Hussey
Mavericks
Having just concluded Cinequest 20, the partners in this destination film festival are working on a scheme to bring cameras to the children of some of Earth’s worst neighborhoods. Meanwhile, it’s their intention to transform San Jose into a film hub. If any part of the plan sounds unlikely—well, it was twice as unlikely that this team would get a film festival up and running in an area that had previously chewed up and spit out several film fests. A veritable institution now, it’s hard to imagine San Jose without Cinequest.
Jack Nyblom, Jim Zuur
Screen Gents
Former San Jose State film instructor Jim Zuur (left) and his partners Jack Nyblom (right) and Dennis Skaggs reopened a closed, small one-room theater 35 years ago this fall and turned it into the Camera Cinemas—which now include Camera 12 and Camera 3 in San Jose, Camera 7 in Campbell and the Los Gatos Cinema. Throughout an era that saw big chains claw their way into the market, Team Camera kept independent cinema alive, breaking the work of new directors like Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodovar. Recently retired and about to turn 70, Zuur’s latest mission is to become one of the nation’s five fastest swimmers in his age class.
Joe Guerra
Behind the Throne
Exercising power behind the scenes, young Realtor and former community newspaper publisher Joe Guerra entered public life as chief of staff to Councilman Frank Fiscalini and then served as Mayor Gonzales’ budget director. As both a private citizen and public service, Guerra’s had his fingers in many of the developments that have reshaped San Jose: the revitalization of Willow Glen’s Lincoln Avenue, the midtown condo boom, Santana Row, the new City Hall and just about everything else built during the Gonzales administration. He continues shaping policy today as a lobbyist.
Dennis Nahat
Feet Me
Around Silicon Valley, artistic directors come and go, and companies sometimes crash and burn. When its 15-year Cleveland co-venture partner did that in 2000, Ballet San Jose picked up the slack, giving the valley a full time professional dance company that has continued to evolve. Grooming local dancers from the ballet’s school while poaching talent from Asia, Latin America and East Coast cities has made for a company with many influences, allowing for fresh twists on classics, cultural fusions and modern experimentation. Nahat’s entrepreneurial positive energy and good fortune in attracting backers like Fry’s and the Loewenstern family have contributed the core team’s longevity.
