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Before Joe Simitian learned to make laws, he had to break one.
As a 13-year-old child of divorced parents, he found himself at a crossroads in 1966, unsure of whether to live with his mother, who lived in Colorado Springs, or with his father, who had moved to Cupertino and, later, to Palo Alto. The decision, which would ultimately shape his life and touch those of many others on the Peninsula, proved perplexing, Simitian recalled at a March 30 celebration of his four decades of public service.
He remembered being in a Palo Alto courtroom where Judge Stanley Evans, a former Palo Alto council member, asked him where he wanted to live. Simitian couldn’t answer and the judge moved to preserve the family status quo. Simitian moved back to Colorado.
He returned to Palo Alto the following summer and quickly found a community at the Children’s Theater. He resolved to stay. This time, however, he faced another judge who was less receptive to his feedback. After determining that the 14-year-old in front of him was “headed for trouble,” the judge announced that Simitian would remain in his mother’s custody, bound for Colorado Springs.
Later in the day, as Simitian and his mother passed the time before their flight at an El Camino Real motel, he sprang into action.
“I excused myself and went to the restroom, where I opened the window, took the screen off, hopped out the window and took off on El Camino Real heading north,” Simitian recalled. “I found a payphone … called my friends at the Palo Alto Children’s Theater, told them what was happening, told them I needed their help, and we agreed that we’d rendezvous later that afternoon, which we did. … They brought cold cereal and blankets because we knew that my friend, Alden Crews, was on a family vacation, so I could spend the night on the ground in the toolshed in the back of the Crews home on Louis Road. … I spent the night and discovered that Palo Alto is surprisingly cold … the ground was surprisingly hard.”
The reprieve proved to be short-lived. His father, respecting the law, called the police and an officer came to escort Simitian back to his mother. But as the officer was stuck in traffic on Middlefield Road, Simitian hatched another gambit.
“Even as a 14-year-old, I had a thought, ‘If I fly back to Colorado, this is all over and it’s not what I want,’” Simitian said. “So while he was stuck in traffic, I opened the door and took off, and ran down Garland Drive, just past what was then Jordan Junior High School, moved quickly … went through the front gate, over the fence, through someone’s backyard and their front gate, only to discover in this unfamiliar neighborhood that I found myself in a cul de sac, with a cop coming around the corner. At this point he said, ‘Kid, that was a stupid thing to do.’”
Simitian then spent two days at the Palo Alto police station jail cell, followed by two more at the Santa Clara County juvenile hall in San Jose, where he shared a cell with one youth who stole a car and another who had dealt drugs.
“The kid on top thought spitting on me from top bunk while I was sleeping at night was some form of amusement and recreation,” Simitian said.
One upshot from the experience was that his parents worked things out and he was allowed to stay in Palo Alto for a year to see if it worked out. Another was that he decided to be a lawyer.
“Because as far as I can tell, everyone who was making decisions about my life was a lawyer, so I should become someone who can make those decisions rather than have someone make the decisions for me,” he said.
Things worked out. Simitian became a lawyer and then a lawmaker, winning elections to the school board in 1983 and then to the City Council in 1991. After four years on council, including a stint as mayor 1995, he moved to his first of two stretches as a Santa Clara County supervisor.
“I could not have imagined that the courthouse where I spent two summers would end up being the location of the Palo Alto district office as a member of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors,” Simitian recalled. “I could not have imagined that every day I’d go to work in San Jose, I’d have to wait at an all-too-long traffic signal staring at Juvenile Hall where I’d been incarcerated.”
Simitian’s public recollection of his origin story in Palo Alto followed testimony from his colleagues at every level of government at which he served. Former school board member Julie Jerome remembered his disdain for acronyms and his formal resolution, which stated, “Whenever confronted with the opportunity to employ acronyms, abbreviations, alphabet soup and ambiguous words and phrases, we won’t.” His former City Council colleague Joe Huber suggested that Simitian may have liked words a little too much.
“On anything of consequence, Joe had the approach of listing three points, three pro and three con,” Huber recalled at the event. “Kind of like Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ On the one hand… on the other hand.”
“I knew I was in trouble because I had to go to work the next day and God knows how long he would go on. I tapped my pen, I pointed to my watch, cleared my throat and even mentioned that there’s only 272 words in the Gettysburg Address. You may ask, ‘Did any of that work?’ Of course it didn’t.”
His words often proved very persuasive. Darrell Steinberg, who served as California Senate President Pro Tempore in 2012, remembered Simitian’s successful push to create “transitional kindergarten,” a grade between preschool and kindergarten. The bill was running against the midnight deadline to pass the budget, Steinberg said. He said another colleague was presiding over the meeting when Simitian appealed to him for help.
“Joe ran to get me, ‘Mr. Pro Tem, we need you. I need you. Can you come preside?’” Steinberg recalled. “I remember walking with him up to the dais and he followed me and I took the bill from sixth in the queue to first and at 11:45 a.m., it came up.
“The Republicans didn’t speak that long, if they did I would have gaveled them down. And at 10 minutes to 12, TK passed, was signed by the governor and now 151,000 kids every single year have transitional kindergarten.”
He was similarly persuasive as he pushed for restitution for Rick Walker, an East Palo Alto resident who was wrongly incarcerated for a murder he did not commit and who had spent 12 years in prison before his exoneration. Simitian authored a bill that would allocate $400,000 for Walker. Alison Tucher, who is currently the presiding justice of the California Court of Appeals in Division, said that the Republican leadership was resolved at the time not to vote for any measure that had fiscal implications. Simitian urged them in a speech to consider, arguing that the government had made a mistake that it now had a chance to address.
“After his speech and after he worked the room, the Republicans who had all followed the directive walked to the rostrum one by one and changed their vote,” Tucher recalled.
Palo Alto Vice Mayor Vicki Veenker, a leading organizer of the event at the Lucie Stern Community Center, recited the long list of “hardware” that exists in Palo Alto because of Simitian. There’s the teacher housing project on Grant Avenue, near the courthouse where Simitian sat through custody hearings, and the allcove, a center that supports youth mental health. There’s Mitchell Park place, a housing project that is getting built in south Palo Alto for adults with development disabilities; and the Palo Alto History Museum, a long-planned project on Homer Avenue that Simitian supported. There is Valley Health Care North County, an urgent care facility on Middlefield Road; and Project Homekey, a transitional housing project that is now getting constructed on San Antonio Road.
Those in Palo Alto’s political establishment recalled Simitian’s strong friendship with Gary Fazzino, another East Coast transplant and Palo Alto High School grad who would go on to become an iconic Palo Alto council member and mayor. Annette Fazzino, Gary’s wife, recalled the day that her husband died in 2012 after a battle with cancer. Simitian handled the funeral arrangements, wrote the obituary and, several months later, accompanied Fazzino’s daughter, Julia, to her school’s father-daughter dance.
“Julia wanted to go but didn’t want to go and be the only one there with her mom instead of her dad,” Annette Fazzino said. “Her uncle Joe cleared his calendar and danced the evening away with Julia.”
Simitian was such a prolific campaigner and office holder that Huber recalled Gary Fazzino once complaining that he would go broke if Simitian ran for any more offices. But his string of election victories came to an end last year, when Simitian finished in a tie for second place in the primary election to succeed U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo. After a recount, Simitian ended up just five votes behind former Assembly member Evan Low, who ultimately lost in the general election to former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo.
“I’m often asked about Joe from a lot of people I know around the county and my usual response was, ‘He’s a good government man. Politician, sure. But honest, hard-working, looked out for public interest, cared deeply about his constituents,’” Huber said. “What more can one ask? It’s too bad he was unable to fill one more post.”
Catch Friday’s print and online editions for a full Q&A with Joe Simitian on his four decades spent serving his constituents in Palo Alto and beyond.
Joe is the most outstanding public servant I have ever met. I hope every aspiring candidate for office in our County will seek him out for advice on how to listen to constituents and find common ground with council members who have different priorities.