SAN JOSE, CA — In a celebration of the life and contributions of Tony Cortese, long-term local National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 193 President and food drive initiator in San Jose that ultimately became the national food drive, the U.S. Postal Service will hold a ceremony on March 5, 2011, at 4:00 p.m., to rename the Westgate Post Office, 4285 Payne Avenue, San Jose, as the Tony Cortese Post Office. The ceremony will feature USPS Bay-Valley District Manager Kim Fernandez and U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who introduced the bill to rename the Post Office building for Tony Cortese.

“The dedication of a Post Office building in the memory of a former postal employee is particularly fitting  because a Post Office, much like Tony Cortese who unified people for a common cause, also unifies and binds this nation together through the mail,” said Fernandez. “A Post Office has a simple and functional purpose…one that sends a message of strength and unity throughout our community and across our nation and serves as a cornerstone of every town and city across America. The very character of Tony Cortese is as strong as the cornerstone of the Westgate Post Office.”

From 1965 until 2007, Anthony “Tony” Cortese worked as a letter carrier for the San Jose Post Office. In 1981 he was elected president of NALC Branch 193 for the City of San Jose and its surrounding communities. During his tenure as president, Cortese worked with management to fairly represent his members while at the same time promoted community outreach events that benefited the public.

Cortese and his membership helped establish the local NALC Food Drive to help feed hungry families throughout Santa Clara County. Eventually, the food drive would be adopted nationally and is now in its 19th year. Last year’s national total exceeded 77 million pounds of food collected, and in 18 years our letter carriers have collected over 1 billion pounds of food to feed the nation’s hungry.

In honor of Tony Cortese, the Second Harvest Food Bank will have a tent on site to collect food from the public at the renaming ceremony. It’s the way Tony would want to be remembered.

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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 150 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $67 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 29th in the 2010 Fortune 500. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency six consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.