The saint whose name outran him to a mailbox on Stevens Creek
Cupertino, on Stevens Creek Boulevard, takes its name from Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th-century Italian friar whose devotional image was printed across Catholic Europe for over a century before Spanish missionaries carried his name to a Santa Clara Valley rancho. The boulevard's post office now bears the name of Matthew G. Axelson, a local Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan in 2005.
A flying friar's name reached California before his image did
Long before Stevens Creek Boulevard existed, engravers were at work. In Naples, Lisbon, and Utrecht, they printed the face of a saint named Joseph of Cupertino. He was a 17th-century Franciscan friar. He was known for fits of levitation during prayer. Devotional images of him spread across Catholic Europe for more than a century. One print survives from 1700, another from 1750, another from 1779, another from 1790, and one more from 1855. None of these images ever touched California. But the name did. Spanish missionaries later carried Joseph's name to a rancho in the Santa Clara Valley, and it stuck to the town that grew up around it. Every street sign in Cupertino today, including this one, repeats the name of a man who never crossed the Atlantic.
A Cupertino post office was renamed for a dead SEAL
Matthew G. Axelson grew up in Cupertino and became a Navy SEAL, a Petty Officer 2nd Class. In June 2005 he was one of four SEALs dropped into the mountains of Kunar Province, Afghanistan. The mission was reconnaissance. It was compromised almost as soon as it began. The team was surrounded and overwhelmed. Axelson died in the firefight. Three SEALs were killed that day. The operation would later be told in the book and film Lone Survivor. Two years later, Congress passed an act renaming the building at Stevens Creek Boulevard. It became the "Petty Officer 2nd Class (SEAL) Matthew G. Axelson Post Office Building." It is a working post office. People still mail letters and pick up packages inside it, under a dead SEAL's name, on a street that already carried a dead saint's.
A quarry shooting killed three coworkers near Cupertino
The names on Stevens Creek's post office are not the only violent ends this ground has kept. Six years after Axelson's death, a Cupertino man named Shareef Allman walked into a pre-dawn safety meeting. It was at the Lehigh Southwest Cement quarry, in the foothills above town. He opened fire with a handgun and a rifle. Three coworkers died. Six more were wounded before their shift had even started. It was one of the deadliest workplace shootings in the Bay Area's history. It happened not in some distant war. It happened on a hillside a few miles from where letters get sorted under a dead SEAL's name.
Mail still moves through the building at Stevens Creek Boulevard, under a name the town chose to keep.
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