San Francisco Mayor and California Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom is no stranger to adversity. He grew up in a single-parent household where he pulled his weight to help make ends meet and in school he struggled with a profound learning disability. Gavin’s upbringing instilled in him a strong work ethic coupled with an intimate understanding of some of today’s most complex social and economic issues. Above all, the obstacles that Gavin faced growing up taught him to live his life with confidence and optimism-two attributes that he strives each day to help his constituents find within themselves.
Contrary to popular belief, Gavin Christopher Newsom was not born and raised in a world of wealth and privilege. His mother, Tessa Newsom gave birth to Gavin in San Francisco when she was eighteen and to his sister Hilary when she was twenty. Gavin’s mother (who died in 2002 after a five year battle with breast cancer) and his father, Judge William Newsom, who lived together in Cole Valley and the Marina District of San Francisco, separated when Gavin was two and divorced when Gavin was just five years old. After the divorce, Gavin was raised by his mother in Corte Madera and Larkspur, California, where she worked hard at three jobs (secretary, paralegal and waitress) to support Gavin and his sister. Growing up, both Gavin and Hilary worked on the weekends as well as every summer to help their family make ends meet.The family also took in several foster children over the course of Gavin’s childhood. Gavin has said that ” I have always understood you can’t take things for granted. You have to fight hard every day” and he credits his mother with being a “model of that, of sacrifice and hard work.”
From his father, Gavin learned about the complicated world of politics. Judge Newsom is good friends with the Getty family and has familial ties to the Pelosi family. In 1975 then-governor (and current Democratic nominee for governor) Jerry Brown appointed Judge Newsom to the Superior Court of Placer County and later to the State Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Unlike his powerful friends, however, Judge Newsom did not have much money due to what Gavin refers to as Judge Newsom’s “extraordinary selflessness.” Gavin recalls that his father “helped more people financially, people in need to a degree that is unimaginable to me.” As a child Gavin did spend time with the Getty’s, going with them on exotic vacations which exposed Gavin to a totally different environment than the one he knew at home with his mother and sister. Gavin has said that his mother “had a way of not making us feel privileged. If we had the privilege of going on a summer trip with the Getty family, we would come back and my mother would remind us real quick: ‘That was great, but here’s reality.’ ” These experiences traveling between two drastically different worlds caused Gavin to become sensitive to the stark differences between the lives of those who have plenty and those who do not.
Growing up, Gavin grappled with academics due to what Gavin himself describes as “massive” Dyslexia, a learning disability which makes reading, writing, spelling and speaking difficult because letters and sounds are mixed up. It still affects him today. Gavin worked incredibly hard to persevere despite his challenges. He stayed late after school three days a week to get extra help from a teacher, learned to turn the other cheek when his classmates made fun of him and took an interest in choir, photography and sports to help build his self-esteem. Gavin has said that his Dyslexia
“wasn’t a disability, it was an ennobling gift. It forced me to find different disciplines. And the consequence of that is I was able to excel in areas where others didn’t because I had to apply myself exponentially more and develop different skills. And that’s been a godsend. It helped me to gain more confidence, and with the confidence, more self-esteem, with more self-esteem, more willingness to think drastically.”
In high school Gavin excelled at sports (he was on both the varsity basketball and baseball teams at Redwood High School) not because he was naturally athletic but because he “literally worked harder than anyone on else” on the team. Gavin then attended college at Santa Clara University which he paid for with a partial baseball scholarship and student loans. He majored in Political Science and he credits his college professors with helping him to finally learn how to face his academic obstacles.
Gavin’s first job out of college was selling podiatric orthotics door-to-door. He then got his real estate licence and worked in Operations for the San Francisco real estate firm Shorenstein and Co., where his everyday duties ran the gamut from cleaning bathrooms to removing asbestos. In 1992 Gavin opened the Plumpjack Wine Store in the Fillmore District of San Francisco. Gavin did receive some financial assistance from the Getty’s and several other well-known backers to launch the wine store but the truth is that when it came to the success or failure of the business, Gavin was in full control. Gavin has said “I never wanted money for money’s sake. But I never wanted to be in the financial circumstances my parents were in. Never. So I worked so hard with those businesses not to be in that position.” Pat Kelly, who has known Gavin since they were teenagers and worked with Gavin at the Plumpjack Wine Store has noted that Gavin “put together the business plan and brought in investors.” Gavin has said of his successes in business that “I developed strategies and created opportunities. I executed. I implemented. I produced results and I did it over and over again. No one ever “knocked on my door saying, ‘Gavin, this is all yours.’ ”
After working for the Plumpjack Group (which now includes fourteen business enterprises ranging from resorts to restaurants and wineries) for four years, Gavin’s desire to take on the issues that he saw affecting his fellow San Franciscans was realized. Gavin became a volunteer for then Mayor Willie Brown’s campaign for mayor and in 1996 he was appointed by Mayor Brown to San Francisco’s Traffic and Parking Commission. As president of the commission, Gavin earned a reputation as a champion of causes to help better the lives of San Francisco’s residents. In 1997, Gavin was appointed by Mayor Brown to fill a vacancy on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Gavin was elected to the Board in 2000 and re-elected in 2002. In 2003, at the age of thirty-six Gavin ran for mayor and won, becoming San Francisco’s youngest mayor in one hundred years. He was re-elected in 2007, after winning 72% of the vote.
Throughout his career in San Francisco, Gavin has used his position as a politician to address important issues like homelessness and poverty, job creation and marriage equality because he understands the personal implications that these issues have for his constituents. Gavin feels a personal connection to the people he serves because he knows what its like to grow up without much money, to struggle with personal challenges and to work hard to achieve success. In short, Gavin takes on these issues not because they are easy to solve or will win him political points-but because he believes in “building people’s sense of self. Giving people the ability to believe that there’s something greater than themselves and there’s something they have to contribute.”
Gavin takes a personal-not just political-interest in his constituents. He walks San Francisco’s Tenderloin District every Friday so that he can see the problems facing this troubled area for himself. On weekends he can be found in the Bayview/Hunters Point and Sunnydale districts of San Francisco, where the city’s housing projects are located, listening to the concerns of the area’s residents. In 2004, he joined the picket lines of San Francisco hotel workers whose union struck against fourteen hotels in the city. And he takes time out of his day to perform marriage ceremonies for both straight and (before Proposition 8 passed) gay couples.
Gavin Newsom is someone who faces challenges with confidence and optimism. He is unafraid to take on big issues like homelessness, education, marriage equality and poverty because he believes that people should be free to live their lives out loud, to find self confidence and optimism for the future within themselves, without anything blocking their path. At his core Gavin believes that
“everybody — regardless of where they come from, regardless of their many beliefs, their disabilities, regardless of their ethnicity, their sex orientation, geography to everybody else — everybody has that something that makes them 100 percent distinctive. And if they can find that and build on it, then they have something totally extraordinary to offer and that gives them confidence and optimism. And with confidence and optimism, everything in life is possible.”
