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Rod Diridon, the son of an Italian immigrant railroad brakeman, is generally considered the "father" of modern transit service in Santa Clara County. His political career began in 1972 as the youngest person ever elected to serve on the Saratoga City Council. He recently retired, because of term limits, after completing six terms as Chairperson of both the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and Transit Board. He is the only person to have chaired the San Francisco Bay Area's three regional government agencies: the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the Association of Bay Area Governments.
Rod has chaired over one hundred national, state, and local community service programs and projects, most related to transit and the environment. He served, in 1994, as the Chairperson of the American Public Transit Association and is on the Management Committee (Board of Directors) of the Union Internationale des Transports Publics (International Transit Association). He has been a long-time member of the Federal Transit Administration's Transit Industry Technical Development Advisory Committee and the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board's Transit Oversight and Project Selection Committee which he was elected to chair in 1995. Rod is on the Corporate Boards of Directors of the San José National Bank and the Empire Broadcasting Company. From 1969 to 1976 he served as President of the Decision Research Institute, where he developed a "shared survey" research procedure subsequently adopted by the UNICEF. Rod earned both B.S. in Accounting and MS in Business Administration from San José State University and has been listed in Who's Who in America since 1974.
For a listing of items cataloged by Special Collections at the San José State
University Library, see A Guide to the Papers of Rod Diridon.
Prepared by Susan Klingberg, Curator of Legislators' Archives.
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