Cupertino DailyFirst City Manager in Cupertino
Phil Storm
First City Manager for the
City of Cupertino
A History Mystery Solved!
Written by Donna Austin
We
had a history mystery at the Cupertino Historical Museum! Our city manager for Cupertino, Dave Knapp,
received a call from a moving and storage company in Martinez, California. A
woman said they were cleaning out their inventory and ran across some boxes
filled with Cupertino History. She said someone had lovingly put together
scrapbooks of the early beginnings of Cupertino as a city.
Dave Knapp our currant city manager, called to ask if anyone from CHS would be
interested in the boxes found in storage in Martinez. Since my husband and I were babysitting in Pleasanton, we decided
that we would be half way to Martinez and gladly made the trip. The City of
Martinez was a pleasant surprise. Once you leave the freeway you see a quaint
town filled with trees. I was told you can visit John Muir’s Home in Martinez
and it is a National Historic Site.
When
we arrived at the storage company, we found that there were three very dusty
boxes with no name or identification on them. I signed for the boxes and
promised I would try to find the family.
The
boxes were filled with pictures and photo albums and 3 wonderful scrapbooks of
newspaper articles about our early Cupertino government. These boxes once
belonged to our first city manager, Phil Storm. We wondered how did the boxes
get to Martinez? Where is his family today? There are baby pictures and hunting
pictures and wedding pictures and ancestor pictures. The scrapbooks contained many
news articles from Sunnyvale Sun, Santa Clara, San Jose, and Cupertino and the
Monta Vista Courier. The articles all related to the city and council decisions
guided by the city manager Phil Storm.
In
Pete Emig’s, ”The Human Touch”, he quotes Philip W. Storm as saying,
“Personal integrity is a great cornerstone of leadership. One must work to earn and deserve the
complete faith of his colleagues, his council and all the citizens of his
community. In order to exert leadership one prime requisite is to obtain the
confidence and respect of those whom you guide…”
The
more I read, the more impressed I was with our first city manager. Beginning in
December 1959, Phil Storm held the job of Cupertino City Manager for 11 years.
Bob Quinlan took over as second city manager in February 1971. Don Brown in
January 1989 and Dave Knapp in June 2000.
I
asked city officials why there wasn’t something named after Phil Storm and they
said the city maintenance yard is named after Phil Storm because he liked to go
there at lunch and play cards with the crew. That is the kind of guy Phil Storm
was.
We were fortunate to have Sharon Hoyt (Volunteer/New History
Detective) helping us by working on Phil Storm’s genealogy. We contacted her
through the California History Center. She is a wonderful resource and
specializes in genealogy research. She found that our first city manager, was:
Philip Wilford Storm
- Born 19 Nov 1899 in San
Francisco
- Died Aug. 1985 in Reno,
Nevada
- Wife: Margaret (nee Martin)
died in 1980
According to
his obituary dated August 26, 1985 in the Cupertino Courier, Philip W. Storm
was the first City Manager of Cupertino. Prior to his job in Cupertino, he had
been trained as a civil engineer, and had served as City Manager in Redding,
California; Avalon, Catalina Island; and Buena Park, California.
At the time of his death in 1985, Philip Storm was survived by
his son, James Storm and also survived by 4 grandchildren. Sharon Hoyt listed
the grandchildren’s names as printed in the 1985 article, with the spellings
that she thought was actually correct in parentheses:
- Silvia (Sylvia) Cloninger
of San Mateo
- Lisa (Lise) Storm of Foster
City
- Philip Holmes and Steven
Holmes of Mountain View.
Armed with the
above information and phone numbers provided by Sharon, I contacted Sylvia and
she came to the museum. She was so happy to meet all of us, and to see the baby
book, pictures and scrapbooks that she thought had been lost forever. Her
father, James Storm is in a convalescent home in Burlingame, and was greatly interested in the
pictures and scrapbooks and memorabilia that we provided for him and I was
assured that it meant a lot to him.
Sylvia donated the scrap
books back to the museum after she shared them with her father because there is so much Cupertino history in those
books that were so lovingly compiled by her grandmother. We are so lucky to
have these scrap books as part of our collection. Come by sometime to the
Cupertino Historical Society Museum at Quinlan Center (10185 North Stelling Rd.
Cupertino, CA) to see them.
Tags: city manager, Cupertino
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