Three people who made a difference

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Jan Lamphier was a close friend. I first met her when I was on the school board and she was school secretary at Abbott Middle School. Later she was part of the small group which worked to defeat the 24-hour card room in Bay Meadows. She had a flair for writing letters to the editor. That was her main job. It was so effective we attracted enough community support to stop the card room. She and her late husband, Dave, were regular volunteers at fires with hot coffee and home-baked cookies on hand. I suggested the Lamphiers might also volunteer at our new main library. They soon became a fixture in the lobby welcoming visitors and answering questions. The Lamphiers were loved by the city’s police and fire departments who will show up in force at Jan’s memorial as they did for Dave.

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Umang Gupta was a neighbor whom I often saw walking his dog. But I first met him when I was San Mateo mayor. As part of an outreach to business leaders — large and small — I met with Gupta at his Keynote headquarters, near the Bridgepointe Shopping Center. Keynote was once the site of Franklin Templeton.

Tech entrepreneurs and scientists from Silicon Valley and India attended in great numbers his memorial at the Peninsula Golf and Country Club — to honor his intelligence, his business acumen and his charitable efforts. He founded Kainos in Redwood City, a residential home for adults with intellectual and development disabilities. Mitch Postel, head of the San Mateo County Historical Association, was there to pay tribute to a major funder of the museum. Postel told me Gupta wanted to sponsor a collection on immigrants rather than tech leaders.

Gupta was born in 1949, in Patiala, in the northern Indian state of Punjab. His mother and father were socialists from different castes who met at Gandhi’s funeral.

Gupta earned a degree in chemical engineering at I.I.T. Kanpur, then went to the United States to earn an MBA at Kent State University. He worked for a time as a salesman for IBM, then moved to Silicon Valley in 1978.

The New York Times, in its obituary of Gupta, wrote:

“He was part of a new breed of entrepreneurs, like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who helped build an independent software industry.

“Gupta had a ringside seat as one of Oracle’s early employees, taking credit for writing the company’s first formal business plan in 1981.”

Gupta ultimately left Oracle to start his own company, Gupta Technologies, and took it public — a major breakthrough for an Indian-run company.

He later became chief executive of Keynote Systems, which he sold in 2013 when he retired and devoted himself to philanthropy. That same year he helped develop the free app Reading Racer which uses speech recognition to help children read out loud.

Sue Lempert is the former mayor of San Mateo. Her column runs every Monday. She can be reached at sue@smdailyjournal.com.