by Jeffrey Mu ‘24
If you are eligible to vote in the general election this November, you may see the name of former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo while scanning your ballot. Bellarmine graduate of the Class of 1987, Liccardo focuses on issues of green energy, affordable housing for homeless, transit in the Bay Areas, and advancing the technological sector of San Jose. This year, he is running to become one of 435 representatives in the House of Representatives, representing District 16, which includes Bellarmine.
Liccardo has been a prominent part of Bellarmine’s alumni community since he graduated in ‘87. Students may have come across the Liccardo building and wondered about its connection to the Liccardo name, having seen many dinners, socials, and gatherings hosted within its premises. They may have noticed the correlation between a Bellarmine education and political office in greater San Jose, or even seen Liccardo’s dedication to making a difference in the community through his outreach.
This month, The Bell Online sat down with Liccardo to talk about his Bellarmine experience, the lessons he learned from his Jesuit education, and his advice for students venturing into the greater world outside of the B.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
The Bell Online (TBO): Tell me about your high school experience at Bellarmine. Did you have a favorite class or teacher? Were you involved in any extracurriculars?
Sam Liccardo (SL): I had a wonderful experience at Bellarmine. I showed up as a scrawny kid, a year younger than everybody else because I had skipped a grade, which made [high school] more challenging. But what I found out pretty quickly were a few important things that saved me in a big way. One was that everybody could find their own “tribe”: a group that cared about whatever they were doing. Maybe that was heavy metal music, Speech and Debate, or football, but regardless, for someone my age feeling out of place, that was reassuring. The other thing that became apparent was that [Bellarmine] was a place where teachers genuinely cared for students, the challenges we faced, and how they could help us overcome those challenges. Sadly, I think that’s a relatively unique experience for a lot of teenagers in lots of places, so I felt really blessed to be here. Finally, something that struck me was that there was a certain assumption that you could be fourteen, fifteen, or eighteen, but whatever age you were, you were passionate about pursuing excellence. There wasn’t a lot of competition, and that certainly showed amongst students, because everybody had their own thing, and there was a lot of encouragement. I was on the cross-country team and we were a bunch of scrawny runners, but we’d get football players who showed up to cheer us on. There’s a lot of comparison that goes on online nowadays where we’re never as good as the idealized versions that our peers may offer on social media or otherwise, and so it’s good to be part of something that enables you to be unique, and still try your best.
TBO: Did your experience at Bellarmine shape your political views? Were you planning to run for office when you graduated?
SL: I was interested in lots of things when I was at Bellarmine, not just politics. Although I did manage to get involved in student government, it wasn’t so much because I was convinced I was going to be in elected office. Rather, I found lots of different “tribes” for myself. For example, I loved running cross country, even though I wasn’t a very good athlete, because it was one thing where you could get on the team and they wouldn’t cut you even if you were a mediocre runner like I was. I tried speech and debate for a couple years, and that was fun. I did get involved in student government, which was called “Service Club” back in the day. There always seemed to be a few friends that I could connect with about whatever it was, and that’s important when we’re teenagers just trying to figure ourselves out.
You had asked me about favorite teachers that I had, and there were several teachers I really enjoyed [the classes of]. Unfortunately, I think just about all of them are gone now; that’s the price of being 53 years old. There was a wonderful man by the name of Tom Alessandri, who was a legendary theater and literature professor, who had passed away about four or five years ago.
Even when I went on to college, graduate school, and law school, I still heard from my [Bellarmine] peers because there was a pretty good crew of us that went on to Georgetown, and maybe seven or eight of us that ended up at Harvard one way or another. But what’s remarkable is that we would talk about our teachers at Bellarmine as being some of the best teachers we had, which is kind of astounding: to be at a place like Harvard University and saying, “hey, Alessandri was really great!”
TBO: What were your classes at Bellarmine like? Did you have a focus or know what you wanted to pursue right away? Or did you take different classes and try to see what direction you wanted to take?
SL: You were more so told to take a bunch of classes, and you obeyed. We sort of knew that in order to get into a good school, we needed to take challenging classes, but we didn’t have as many AP classes in those days, only a couple. We had prerequisites – physics, science, four years of a language, that kind of stuff – but for the most part, we didn’t have as much variety as you guys have nowadays. And frankly, being sixteen or seventeen years old, I wasn’t really sure what [I] wanted to do anyways.
TBO: Many buildings on campus, like Sobrato or Lokey, are named after alumni of Bell who made contributions to the school in one form or another. Could you provide some insight into your connection with the Liccardo building on campus?
SL: The Liccardo building was named after a fellow by the [same] name of Sam Liccardo, a portrait of whom you’ll see if you venture to the very back of the second floor, [pictured] sitting in a recliner armchair. This Liccardo is my grandfather.
You might have thought [Mr. Liccardo] a well-educated, tremendously wealthy man, and that he must have given [Bellarmine] a lot of money, but in fact none of those things are true. On the contrary, [Mr. Liccardo] had an eighth-grade education, and he went to work after he graduated from elementary school because his father, my great grandfather, had died. [Mr. Liccardo] lived in Brooklyn in his childhood, and like all immigrant families, he did what he had to do to keep the family fed. It was only when he made his way out to California for an opportunity to work that he began to be involved and passionate about education, since he had a couple of sons, including my dad, and he really wanted them to go to a Jesuit school. Like many first-generation folks, he understood the value of education in America, and he recognized that that was a thing he never had, and he had always wanted to go on to become a lawyer. Obviously, with an eighth-grade education, that was something he could never do. But he admired lawyers, and he always wanted to go to law school. He also did a lot of reading; he read the newspaper voraciously, and was very on top of current events. I could always tell as a kid that he cared a lot about knowledge, and he really desired that all of us get a good education.
It was when my dad started going to Bellarmine when the senior Liccardo became aware that the school was really struggling financially, and they were talking even about closing the doors. [Mr. Liccardo] decided he wasn’t going to let that happen. He was a pretty strong-willed, very outgoing guy, but he could also be very tough to deal with. And so his solution began at what they called Borders at the time, where kids who actually went to school lived and where O’Donnell Hall is now, but it extended to any alumni that lived in a wealthy area in the Bay. He brought a roll of dimes along with him, because when he got to a particular town, like Atherton, he would go to the nearest payphone and start calling everybody there that had a Bellarmine connection, until he dialed somebody who was home. Then he would go up to their door with a Jesuit and tell them that the Father wanted to speak with them. Over time, he raised quite a lot of money that unorthodox way, mostly because it’s pretty hard to say no to a Jesuit on your front porch.
[Mr. Liccardo] also helped to start what was called the Dad’s Club [here at Bellarmine], where he got all the fathers involved to help raise money to save the school. As a volunteer, they never paid him anything. Rather, he just cared about the school, and he wanted to save this important educational institution for his kids, and for the good of others. With all the fundraising he did, [Mr. Liccardo] kept the school afloat. Eventually, in the late 1960s, to thank him, Bellarmine decided to name the newly built school building after him. Given the fact the guy never even went to high school, I think it’s a wonderful lesson to show that anyone could have a huge impact here, even with very little education, as long as they just cared enough to work hard, and cared enough to do something great for the community.
TBO: Do you think Bellarmine has a strong tie to politics in the San Jose area? If so, why is that?
SL: It’s due to some combination of the facts that there is a community here and that matters, and that community is always more powerful than the individual. To the extent that you graduate from Bellarmine, you build a certain community within your class and with teachers, and that community expands as you get to know folks in college.
Say you wanted to borrow money, for example. The conversation begins, and you find the five people you know, and you discover the commonalities that the communities predicated on all of you, your common values. Maybe back then, when everybody was Catholic, those values were more explicit. But still today, regardless of religious affiliation, there are certain common values around, such as being men for others, rallying around social justice, and a desire to improve the community. Those values are really important to signal to other members of the same community that “hey, if this guy’s trying to make it in life, whether he’s trying to get a job, or he could use good recommendation, or maybe he’s trying to run for office, we’re all in this thing together.”
And if you’re in the business of politics specifically, which is about being able to engage communities in ways to help solve problems and improve quality of life for people, it helps immensely when you start with an existing community, and one that’s already engaged. And one that, for the most part, is filled with people who do well in life, and are well educated. That can help you in lots of different ways.
TBO: Do you find yourself returning to that set of core values you mentioned when you think about your own politics?
SL: Certainly. I can remember when I was fourteen or fifteen, we would take part in a day or two-day activity where you spend time doing nothing but talking about a particular issue. One year, it was about AIDS, another, it was about homelessness, and the next, it was nuclear threats and things like that. So the idea was that students would become engaged with these issues, think a little bit more about them independently, and provoke conversations that could be generative.
I can remember one of those years the focus was on homelessness. It wasn’t something that I thought a lot about because I lived in the [su]burbs at the time, but it spurred me into thinking about how I could get involved and make a difference. [Homelessness] is obviously a critical issue today, and many would say it’s the most pressing issue in our community, for good reason. And so I’m grateful that Bell gave me this head start to engage in a way that was to recognize that this issue wasn’t just about removing an eyesore or irritation from the community, which some have perceived it as when seeking out a solution. But you need to start with the folks who are struggling, understanding and appreciating the wide diversity of circumstances that get people there.
TBO: As a Bell alumnus yourself, would you have any advice for the younger generation? For your younger self?
SL: I have lots of advice, but I’ll try to keep it to two points.
First, vote. To give you some context, I’m locked in a top-two race that started when everyone announced their campaigns in December – eleven candidates ran in March. The two candidates, Evan Low and Joe Simitian, are vying to become the other person to join me in the runoff in November. The vote count went back and forth, back and forth, and when the registrar returned their results, it was a deadlock – they each had the same number of votes. I have never seen this happen before, and I can assure you that there are people out there thinking “if only I had just voted, I could have made a difference and helped this or that person get through!” I know when I was eighteen, I was tired of my parents making my decisions for me. Here is your opportunity to make decisions for the community rather than letting the community make those decisions for you.
The second thing I’d say is this: no matter what decision you make, God manages to reshuffle the deck. If you play cards, poker or blackjack, for example, then you would know that the deck is going to get reshuffled every couple of hands, so you don’t stress too much about what order the cards are. [In a similar way], we’re all going to make lots of mistakes, and it’s helpful to know that no matter what decision you make, you won’t see the whole playing field – we’ve got a little bit of natural myopia in mistake-making. Don’t put a lot of pressure on yourself to make all the right decisions, because you’ll have an opportunity to figure it out, and you can always change direction. What’s really important is to take risks, and expect there’s going to be failure. Lots of folks make decisions just to avoid failure, and that in itself is a huge mistake. If you’re going to fail, at least you fail a lot smarter than everybody else because you are taking those risks.
cover photo courtesy of Liccardo’s campaign and Ms. Lily Guggenheim