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View Point: Although Frank Fiscalini has become a politician over time, he says he still doesn't view himself as one.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
'A Man For Others'
Frank Fiscalini is leaving his seat on the council, but that doesn't mean he's going to stop serving San Jose's residents.
By Kate Carter
Frank Fiscalini's reason for being a San Jose City Council member hangs on his office wall. It's a portrait of his family: His wife, Joan; their four children and their spouses, and the 11 grandchildren he had at the time. (He now has 13.)
"The kids have really been after me to get another picture taken," he says, admiring it. "I'm going to have it done. It's time."
Fiscalini, 78, has made it his business to work on making San Jose a better place for his grandchildren to live.
It may sound hokey--like something a politician would say. But those who know Fiscalini know better.
He's not only in the game for his own grandchildren, but also for future generations of San Joseans he has worked to educate and care for
Dec. 31 is Fiscalini's last day in his office, which he has filled over the years with reminders of his public life, many from a grateful constituency.
Fiscalini is leaving office because of term limits, and instead of retiring, he has looked for other venues in which to serve the community he says he "fell in love with" when he first moved to the South Bay in 1942.
He has accepted a job at Silicon Valley Advisors to keep doing what he does best: Provide guidance to San Jose on issues that he's familiar with, and help others become the leaders of the future.
One side of Fiscalini's sixth-floor city council office is almost entirely window that affords a sweeping view of downtown and parts of District 6, the area he has represented on city council since 1992.
Standing, Fiscalini seems a tall figure, even against the backdrop of one of the country's largest cities. It's a city he has grown with and helped grow for decades, playing a role in many key changes over the years.
But after all the years of public service, Fiscalini still doesn't think of himself as a politician.
"I never have viewed this work--maybe calling--as my life's work," Fiscalini says. "I've viewed it more in the context of service to my community rather than work. I suppose I've become a politician over the course time, whatever that word means. I still do not view myself as a politician."
Fiscalini's life's work has covered a lot of different fields and made significant changes to the landscape of San Jose. He was involved with the plans to redevelop San Jose's downtown since the first committee was created in the late 1970s. He led the construction of 10 high schools in the Eastside Union High School District as superintendent. He tamed the incursion of monster homes by working on the design review law. He helped turn the Children's Discovery Museum and Opera San Jose into reality. He led the restoration the St. Joseph's Cathedral.
But he just calls what he's done "people-work"--putting people together to make something greater than any of them, including himself, could alone.
You might call it the secret of his success: He has surrounded himself with good and qualified people, or recognized the goodness and quality in others, and then let them make decisions and downplayed his own role.
And much of the commitment he has shown over the years can be traced to his faith and the values he learned from his own parents and the leaders when he was growing up during the depression.
"I really believe history has shown pretty clearly that my generation has probably contributed more as a generation to the resolution of a major conflict and coming out of a very, very severe depression and taking our place in society and building it than any other of the same degree," Fiscalini says. "Growing up in the Depression is far different than growing up today. The values that you're taught are far different than the values today. If you shape a generation that way, it does have, ultimately, an effect on how things get done and how committed people are to getting them done. I'm very proud that I'm part of that."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
'Better than we found them'
Joe Guerra, a baby boomer himself, is one of those Fiscalini put in place to succeed. Guerra worked on Fiscalini's campaign for the District 6 seat in 1992 and then became his chief of staff when he took office in 1993. He is now the mayoral budget director, and Fiscalini is very proud.
Guerra says he has known Fiscalini "forever," because Guerra's parents and Fiscalini and his wife are friends. There's even a photo of the four of them with the pope, he says.
According to Guerra, to know Fiscalini, one has to understand two things about him: his childhood in San Bernardino and the importance he places on the Jesuit philosophy that he learned as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University, which was then called the University of Santa Clara.
Guerra says Fiscalini follows the Jesuit philosophy of being "A man for others."
Fiscalini grew up as one of seven kids in a poor, diverse neighborhood in San Bernardino. His parents were Italian immigrants. His father worked for the railroad and his mother ran the family's corner grocery store, which they lost during the Depression because she let many customers buy on credit.
Fiscalini credits his family with instilling in him his Catholic faith and his commitment to "always leave things better than we found them."
He also learned the value of using his skills to do more than manual labor.
"I was constantly told, 'You learn to work with your head, not with your hands,' " he says. "I can still hear my dad lecture about the importance of school, because he wasn't able to have a great deal of it."
Fiscalini took to heart his father's admonition, and went on to teach and become a school administrator and then superintendent of a fast-growing school district during an explosion in its student population.
Fiscalini was waiting to enter law school in the fall when he was recruited to teach an English literature class at another Jesuit school, Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. He finally agreed, after initially protesting that he wasn't qualified for the job.
"My teaching career was launched. I fell in love with it," he says.
In an amazingly quick progression for someone who didn't feel he could teach high school English, Fiscalini started with the Eastside Union High School District as a teacher at James Lick in 1950, and by 1956, he was the district's superintendent. He held the position for 25 years, during which time the district expanded at a phenomenal rate, adding 10 high schools and expanding enrollment from 1,000 students to 21,000. In the 20 years since he left the district, it has added only one more high school, he adds.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
"I had the rare privilege of literally putting a district together," Fiscalini says.
He says the experience as superintendent prepared him to be on the city council.
"Not much more can happen to you in a complex school district than probably in a large, fast-growing city," Fiscalini says.
He also says his fluency in Spanish, surprising to many coming from an older Anglo man, gave him access into the lives of many of his students and their parents, who would call him up on his listed phone number and ask for advice or just a listening ear.
"I never regretted having [my number] in the phone book," he says. "Sure, you get crank phone calls. But they're balanced off by the other calls that you get that are far more important. When people understand that you have empathy, they don't hesitate to call."
Fiscalini learned to speak Spanish from the kids he played with in his neighborhood, growing up. Many of them were Mexican immigrants and didn't speak English, so they taught each other words. He supplemented what he learned as a kid with Spanish classes in high school and college and later taught Spanish at Bellarmine and James Lick.
Fiscalini also played baseball with the neighborhood kids, and remembers riding around on his bike to make sure his friends turned out for games. "I just always had an innate desire to work with people and put things together," he says.
He later landed a baseball scholarship to Santa Clara, where he started as a history major and political science minor in 1942.
His college career, however, was interrupted by the war. He served in the U.S. Army for three years during World War II. He spent 18 months stateside before being sent to France as an army medic. He says those experiences opened his eyes to the world outside California and showed him that everyone has pretty much the same fears and needs.
"When you get on the verge of being subjected to some pretty rough stuff, you don't get in the middle of it," he says. "I witnessed too much of what happens."
Fiscalini returned to California in 1946 and married Joan Mignot, the woman he'd met and fallen in love with while going to community college near San Bernardino. The two moved to the Bay Area together, and Fiscalini finished at Santa Clara in early 1948, and then began his career in education.
He left his job as superintendent in 1982, to work as president and CEO for Alexian Brothers Hospital. But he makes the distinction between leaving and quitting.
"I didn't quit, I just moved to another job," he says. "I left there because I felt satisfied and complete. An inside clock just told me it was time to move on."
Courtesy of Frank Fiscalini
Early Days: Young Frank and his brother John, right, in 1928. Fiscalini says he remembers his mother debating whether it was worth 50 cents to pay a traveling photographer for the photo.
Labors of Love
A framed rendering of the Children's Discovery Museum hangs next to Fiscalini's family portrait on his office wall.
Guerra says Fiscalini has had three labors of love in his life: The Children's Discovery Museum, Opera San Jose and the St. Joseph's Cathedral. His work on all three began in the 1980s, in various capacities on committees and boards.
And after five years with Alexian Brothers, he took the full-time job overseeing the restoration of San Jose's landmark cathedral from 1986 to 1988.
"That was a labor of love," Fiscalini says. "It not only gave me an opportunity to get very deep into the history of the Church, but the history of the city, as well."
He says his only disappointment about leaving his job on city council is that he won't be able to officially oversee Opera San Jose's move to the Fox Theater downtown, or to cut the ribbon outside the new city hall.
"But I'll be there," he says. "And I'll enjoy it. And I'll have a vicarious thrill about what really happened and be proud of the work that went into it."
After the cathedral restoration was completed, Fiscalini made the decision to make a run for mayor. It was, he says, another way for him to serve his community.
His opponent was Susan Hammer. It was an intense and hotly contested race and, in 1990, Fiscalini lost by a small margin.
Or as Fiscalini describes it, "I got thumped."
He recovered from the painful race with a vacation in Hawaii and didn't think he would ever put himself on the line that way again.
But, instead, he ran for the vacant District 6 council seat.
"I started to think about our grandkids," says Fiscalini, who now has 13 grandchildren. "This is the truth: I was sitting in a chair at home with my grandson Mark on my lap. He was watching cartoons on television, and I was just sitting there, rocking him. And I thought to myself, 'What's going to happen to these kids? In 20 or 30 years, what are they going to face?' And something just hit me, and it kind of said to me, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?' And I decided I better do it. It was really that simple for me.
"And it was that motivation to not only help them but help every other child that would face the same kinds of conditions: Where they live, can they afford to live, can they get a decent job, decent pay, will they have an environment that's conducive to a decent quality of life so that they can be happy and rear their children in the kind of freedom and peacefulness that you'd want for them."
Guerra worked on Hammer's campaign against Fiscalini, but he joined Fiscalini in his bid for city council.
"There's not an ounce of political ambition in Frank Fiscalini," Guerra says to explain why he decided to work for the opponent of the woman he helped elect mayor. "There were hundreds of times that grandkids were the reason to do things. He would say, 'We've got to have some place for our grandkids to live.' "
Fiscalini was elected city councilman in 1992, and reelected without a run-off election in 1996.
And only a few years after beating Fiscalini in a campaign tinged with mud on both sides, Hammer asked him to co-chair one of her most far-reaching committees, the New Realities Task Force, which looked at the financial situation of the city.
When Ron Gonzales was elected San Jose's mayor in 1998, he asked Fiscalini to become vice mayor.
"I selected Frank primarily because of his outstanding service in a number of fields," Gonzales says, referring to Fiscalini's vast experience with many of San Jose's long-term issues, from long before he was on city council. "He has, I think, set a standard for all council members."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Last Bash: Fiscalini shares a word with Mayor Ron Gonzales at the Dec. 14 reception for him at the Children's Discovery Musem. At right is wife Joan.
'Mr. Delegation'
Fiscalini's office has been involved with the details of life in District 6 and the thornier issues that affect Willow Glen and the surrounding communities.
"I don't think anyone has a closer working relationship with the neighborhoods than our office," Fiscalini says. "It's been, for us, an asset. People in District 6 really care about where they live and will participate in issues that affect them."
Fiscalini and his office staff worked to balance the often competing interests of neighborhoods and developers and business districts that all demanded attention in the tight and populous district. But he didn't forget those who didn't speak up with problems concerning late-night business hours or monster homes.
"Frank's an undying advocate of those who've historically been less served," Guerra says. Guerra gives the example of the tot lot in District 6's lower-income neighborhood of Gregory Park, on the northern edge of Willow Glen.
Guerra says Fiscalini had him drive through the neighborhood and report back. Guerra noticed a tot lot in really bad shape and told Fiscalini about it. Guerra says Fiscalini didn't hesitate to take action on the problem immediately, saying "It's not OK to not do it because they aren't being loud about it."
Mary Pizzo, president of the Gregory Plaza Neighborhood Association, says Fiscalini helped the community most by recognizing leadership among the neighbors and allowing them to help themselves. She says he's responsible for the existence of the neighborhood association at all.
"He had looked at his district, and our little corner really needed some serious attention," Pizzo says. "The neighbors really did care," Pizzo says. "They just needed something to bring them together. He said, 'Let's see what the neighbors says needs to be done.' He identified this as needing some guidance and not a lot of hand-holding."
Fiscalini says helping neighborhoods speak up for themselves is one of the goals of his office. "We foster their development and help people organize themselves," he says.
Pizzo says Fiscalini's fluency in Spanish also contributes to the inclusion of those who often are overlooked, because they don't speak English well.
"It made a big difference to my neighbors," Pizzo says, "to have someone in authority speak to them in a kind and compassionate way in a language they were more comfortable with."
Fiscalini also created an office where all members of his staff had the authority to speak for him. He trusted his aides to make decisions, based on what they knew of his consistent priorities--meeting the needs of neighborhoods and promoting growth in San Jose.
"Frank is a great person to work for," Guerra says. "He's Mr. Delegation. He really gave me the opportunity to grow a lot when he first took office."
Fiscalini says this as "people-work" is the basis for all the work he has done over the years.
At the Plate: Fiscalini attended University of Santa Clara on a baseball scholarship.
Courtesy of Frank Fiscalini
"I have spent most of my life in management," he says. "I learned a long time ago that you hire bright, motivated people and give them room to grow. We're a team. There are no bosses in this office. It helps service people better."
Guerra says Fiscalini is known for his consistency on the issues and for being a diplomat in conflict, not stooping to involve personalities in controversy.
"You never have to guess with Frank," Guerra says. "It doesn't make any difference to him who's on what side of an issue. Frank is the elder statesman. He doesn't ever attack, he's diplomatic."
When talking about all the challenges he has faced in his life and the challenges the city faces, Fiscalini maintains an optimistic, go-get-'em attitude that establishes solutions instead of dwelling on problems.
"I operate on a simple theory," Fiscalini says. "People are fundamentally good, they want to do what is right. As a consequence of that, I don't go into issues being suspicious. I learned early in life to separate issues from people."
Because of his interest in constructive solutions, Fiscalini tends to get right to the point of issues, instead of mired in details. Irene Dalis, founder and general director of Opera San Jose, says he provided quiet leadership at their board meetings.
"He'd let them all talk for sometimes hours," she says. "He would then summarize everything very quickly and then find a solution in a very simple way. He really is a listener who thinks and analyzes, but not in a cold way."
Fiscalini is aware of the many issues San Jose's and District 6's residents face in their neighborhood communities and business districts. Infill housing, libraries, parks and community centers are all real but often contentious needs, especially with the lack of space available in the city's center and the often-prohibitive price of that property.
"Infill housing will present the most challenges," Fiscalini says of the future of District 6. "The last thing that should ever be done is destroy a neighborhood. The thing you don't want to do is disturb what makes it attractive."
But he says his office hasn't fielded a neighborhood dispute in months, a situation he credits to work the city and neighbors have done to establish clear guidelines for housing and remodeling projects.
"It's rare that we get a complaint anymore about some monster going up next door," he says.
He talks about the West San Carlos and Alameda business districts, and acknowledges that Lincoln Avenue is still growing, although a lot has changed since he first arrived on city council.
"We've witnessed a huge change in eight years on Lincoln Avenue," he says. "When I first took office, very little tax revenue was being generated off the avenue. Today it's become a very significant source of income. It's happened in a relatively short period of time."
Courtesy of Frank Fiscalini
Young Couple: Fiscalini and his wife, Joan, in 1946, a few months after their wedding.
End of Term
As he surveys his office and the view out his window, Fiscalini glows with a contentment and a vitality that comes from knowing himself and being satisfied with what he's done and where he's going. He looks as if he's conspiring to perhaps build another cathedral. Or high school. Or museum. Or opera.
"I'm very comfortable with who I am and what I am and what I think and what I believe," Fiscalini says. "I'm feeling very good right now."
He says if there weren't term limits he would have run for another term in office.
"And he would've won," Guerra says, laughing.
But Fiscalini says he understands the importance of term limits because "change is healthy."
"Perhaps they should have been for three [terms], not two," he considers, due to the time it takes to get good at the job.
He's hopeful, though, that he has accomplished his goal of making San Jose a better place for his grandchildren and their children.
"I know when the last day comes and I walk away," Fiscalini says, "that I will feel very, very good about the eight years I spent on this council and proud of my work. I'm proud of the people that I surrounded myself with and proud to have been a very small part of helping the city develop over these eight years. I would hope the decisions we've made over this period of time will have a lasting effect on future decisions. I want to be able, when I reflect a couple of years from now on how I voted, that I did the right thing. I know in my heart we left them (District 6 residents) better than we found them. Things are better today for my having passed this way."
Fiscalini's not going anywhere, though. His new job at Silicon Valley Advisors will keep him in touch with the decisions that affect his beloved city and its residents. And he says he likes to think that he's only a phone call away.
"I've been very, very fortunate because I've had such a broad base of experiences," Fiscalini says. "This is probably my fourth career. I came to politics late in life. I'm not what one would call a professional politician. It's been a wonderful experience. I've enjoyed everything I've ever done. When I get up I'm ready to go and I look forward to the day."
Fiscalini becomes animated as he talks about what lies in his future, having more flexibility in his new job that will allow him spontaneous jaunts with his wife, and more time to spend with his children and grandchildren, all of whom live nearby.
Joan, he says, understands that he can't just retire.
"She knows me better than I know myself," he says, "and she knows that I'd probably go up and down the wall if I wasn't involved and active."
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
