SAN JOSE, CA — Tony Cortese, long-term Branch 193 President of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), and the force behind a local food drive that would ultimately become the largest food drive in the nation, will have a Post Office named in his honor. The U.S. Postal Service will officially dedicate the Westgate Post Office, 4285 Payne Avenue, San Jose, as the Tony Cortese Post Office on March 5, 2011, at 4:00 p.m. The ceremony will feature San Jose Postmaster Sam Vasquez and U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who introduced the bill to rename the Post Office building for 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 Bay-Valley District Manager Kim 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 the 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 promote community outreach events that benefited the public.

Cortese and his membership spearheaded a local letter carrier food drive to help feed hungry families throughout Santa Clara County in the early 1990s. That local one-day food drive that collected a few thousands pounds of food for local food banks would eventually tally 77 million pounds of food in last year’s national food drive. In the 18 years of its existence, letter carriers have collected over 1 billion pounds of food to feed the nation’s hungry, and it all began with the vision of a local letter carrier.

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

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