Co-editors:
Philip C. Wander
Andrew Wood

What does San Jose mean? What does it stand for? For those of us who live and work here (and there are nearly a million of us now)-geographical space, the city, J-Town, the University, Lake Vasona, the Sharks, the Mercury, Channel 36, Silicon Valley, the Tech Museum? Easier to ask, what it means to you or me? This we can talk about. I came to San Jose in the summer of 1966. I came here, in part, because it was the "dried fruit capital of the world." I thought it would be like St. Petersburg, Florida (which I had visited as a boy in the 1950s) with orange blossoms everywhere in the spring. It came to mean the "counter culture," the anti-war movement, and, when I was appointed to the Parks and Recreation Commission of Santa Clara County in the early 1970s, the best system of county parks in the country. Over the years, it has come to mean San Jose State, because this is where I have worked for over thirty years.

Woz Way is a street in San Jose. It slides along Guadalupe Parkway, borders the Children's museum and River Walk. Driving its few short blocks, you can see the Adobe complex, the Events Center, and the Hilton. Beyond, you can see the mountains. It crosses Auzerais, San Carlos and Park, terminates onto an on-ramp on the way to the airport.

I thought it was a contraction of the Wizard of Oz. It offers a mysterious view of the downtown and beyond, a world far beyond Kansas. But it was named for a city benefactor and one of the founders of Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak. I do not know him, but I salute him and all those past, present, and the future who seek to make this a better place. Mine is a more modest contribution. Woz Way, the journal, is dedicated to the proposition that people do better work when they are working on projects that they love. I have established Woz Way to publish the work of undergraduate students who ask and try to answer the question: What is the meaning of San Jose? Their answers contribute to the "rhetoric" of San Jose, which is to say talk about this growing, changing, fascinating world in which so many of us live.

My Associate Editor, Andrew Wood, like me, teaches in the department of Communication Studies at SJSU, and like me he is dedicated to encouraging and publishing stuff about San Jose. We envision work that is lively, readable, and at the same time thoughtful. It is work which, because this is an electronic journal, can be commented on. We envision chat rooms having to do with parks, festivals, schools, neighborhoods, social problems, etc., along with new articles on different subjects.

If you, the reader, want to make any additions or corrections to be made, please send them in. We have the space to include them. In short this is an experimental journal in both content and writing. Essays, poems, photo displays, music, who knows what will crop up, and the writing while it plays off interviews and library research, also draws on personal experience.