Stephen Schott
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Inducted 2004 | |
As a boy, Stephen Schott had dreams of becoming a professional baseball player. While his business career went in a different direction, he ultimately did get into pro ball as managing partner of the Oakland athletics in the late 1990’s. In between, however this native of Santa Clara would be involved primarily in building homes. The Santa Clara Valley was known mostly for its orchards when Mr. Schott was growing up in the 1940s and early ‘50s, and he spent some of those years picking prunes, pears and walnuts on his father’s land. But Santa Clara was already growing, and at age 16 he got a job on a road survey crew for the city of Santa Clara. He did find time to indulge in his passion for baseball, even to the point of earning a partial scholarship at Santa Clara University. That helped him earn a degree in business management. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he spent a year as an accountant for Ford Motor Co. in Milpitas, and then made the switch to home building companies. From the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, Mr. Schott worked his way up to vice presidential posts at a pair of land development companies, and eventually became a partner in one of them. Then in 1976 he and partner Wayne Valley formed Citation Homes. Mr. Schott has been the sole owner since Mr. Valley died in 1986. In fact, Citation Homes has become a family business, as all three children of Mr. Schott and his wife, Pat, are involved in the company. The baseball bug came back to bite Mr. Schott in 1995 when the Oakland A’s came up for sale. He says he wasn’t looking to buy the team, but when he was approached he saw it as an opportunity to keep the team from moving out of Oakland. In 1996 he and partner Ken Hoffman bought the team. As a managing partner he launched a management overhaul that within a few years brought the team the American League’s 2000 Western Division Championship. Outside of his business interests, Mr. Schott and his wife have founded a pair of programs to help the community. One is Role Models, in Which students hear from successful people, from various walks of life about the importance of staying in school. The other is Read to Exceed, which offers rewards to students and teachers if the students read more then a prescribed number of books. The rewards, naturally, include tickets to an A’s baseball game. |
