San Francisco Living
Rudy Reyes '90 finds what he needs in the city

Urban Lifestyle
Rudy Reyes '90
Regulatory Policy Lawyer,
Verizon, Inc.

His friend and classmate, Adam Wolff ’90, lived in San Francisco and
loved it. That must have been enough for Rudy Reyes ’90. His move there after law school, in 1998, was also his first view of San Francisco. The last nine years have repaid him for that leap of faith, over and over again.

For one thing, life in San Francisco reconnected Rudy with “an old joy in [his] life, singing.” As “a scholarship kid from Texas” entering in Class II, Rudy found Milton a big culture shock. “I had never really been away from home,” he says. During those early disorienting weeks, Rudy found his way to Scott Tucker and the Chamber Singers, auditioned, and made the group. That year the Chamber Singers toured Africa, and singing for Rudy became an enduring passion. He carried that passion to Harvard, where he sang baritone for the Collegium Musicum under Jim Marvin, eventually serving as secretary of the group in his sophomore year and president in his junior and senior years. Also interested in choral conducting, Rudy then returned to Milton for a year, as a teaching intern, thanks to a DeWitt Wallace grant. He taught under the mentorship of Scott Tucker. (Scott, says Rudy, “was truly inspirational, one of the brightest spots in my life.” The two remain close to this day.) At the outset of law school the next year, Rudy told himself he didn’t have time for singing and dropped it.

But that changed when Rudy joined Verizon, where he now serves as west region assistant general counsel. Verizon strongly encourages employees to find balance in their lives, so Rudy joined the San Francisco City Chorus, one of the country’s preeminent community choruses. Today, Rudy serves on the board and also sings for Vox Delecti, a select chamber group within the Chorus. Vox Delecti performs some of what Rudy characterizes as the more challenging, technical stuff: Monteverdi, Palestrina, Bach motets, modern, more atonal works. Last year’s concert was entitled “Motets to Madrigals,” this year’s “Romancing the Romantics.” This fall the City Chorus will perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

Singing is important, but Rudy’s connection to San Francisco extends beyond the City Chorus. “I’m always in San Francisco. I live and breathe it every day.” He and his partner, Brody Lee, live in Potrero Hill, a community that lies a little south of Candlestick Park in one of the warm microclimates of San Francisco (Rudy says that the city is really a cluster of micro climates); “it never gets foggy in my area.” According to Rudy, Potrero is a friendly, down-to-earth community. There are neighborhood groups and a neighborhood watch. The community sits on the border of what real estate agents are wont to call transitional neighborhoods, but there is a strong effort in Potrero to resist the oncoming, wholesale gentrification that term implies. “There are real efforts to make this a more mixed neighborhood. Here we all try to understand the challenges and reach out. Planners are looking at ways to maintain project development that helps people grow out of their poverty. It’s never us versus them.” Right now Rudy and Brody are very involved in the traffic-calming project to stop the speeding down the four-block stretch where their house is. They have made it an issue of safety, of community, one that the city is considering making a part of its larger Potrero plan.

At the same time that Rudy is savoring his intensely urban experience, San Francisco also brings him closer to nature than he would have imagined. Many cities limit their residents to the green of city parks and the physical exertions of city blocks and athletic clubs; this is “emphatically not true for San Francisco,” says Rudy. Recently transitioning from basketball to mountain-biking, he has started a mountain-biking club with Adam Wolff. They have thoroughly explored the Bay Area. “There are so many trails. Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge to Oakland, you could never exhaust the possibilities.” San Francisco connects Rudy with the proverbial best of both worlds.

Rudy also loves his work with Verizon. Although the company has some 238,000 employees operating across the country, Rudy’s office is a small shop of five charged with “regulatory policy work, sophisticated policy advocacy. The work I do has meaning and consequence for customers and for communications in general. It’s not just lawsuits; it’s bigger. There’s flexibility; there’s range. I’ve even had to recall some of my college economics courses.” Equally appealing, as big as the work is, Rudy’s office is quite collegial. “There’s a family-style office dynamic,” he says. “It’s the best job I have ever had.”

The more he describes his life in San Francisco, the more it seems that he has been able to re-create some of what he describes as the special chemistry that happens at Milton—in the communities of City Chorus, Potrero Hill, and Verizon. Even the city/open space balance of the Bay Area echoes, in some measure, the leafy suburban and urban mix of Milton. That his old Milton friend Adam Wolff is nearby in San Francisco would seem to cinch the deal.

Rod Skinner ’72

 

Back to Magazine