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| Politics,Family,Community - Tom Hom’s life is filled with that and so much more |
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More than a changing point, it propelled him to a life of community service in which he became the first Asian elected to the City Council and the first from San Diego to serve in the California Assembly. He also helped jumpstart the Gaslamp Quarter, founded the Tom Hom Group, which specializes in building and operating SROs, apartments and housing developments, was instrumental in transforming Mission Valley to accommodate San Diego’s first professional football-baseball stadium and has served on the board of innumerable community organizations supporting San Diego’s Chinese American community.
Hom’s legacy also includes spearheading a movement with late wife Dorothy to restore the old Chinese Mission downtown after moving it to its current site at Third Avenue and J Street, the heart of old San Diego’s Chinatown and, incidentally, where Hom was born in 1927. Now 82, he is a reservoir of historical knowledge, political consultant, musician, painter and often engaged in what has become his favorite pastime – cooking.
Yet, if you were to ask him to name his legacy in a single word, he would reply “Family”. TOM HOM Page 3
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| David Du: Balancing family and business a key to success |
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Du is founder of a business that manufactures and assembles products as diverse as coaxial cables and intricate wiring circuits for a variety of industries and sectors: audio, lighting, defense, utility, communications, transportation, electronics, aerospace and computer, to name a few. In a sense, he is the master of diversity. And that is what has made him successful.
Headquartered in Vista in San Diego’s North County, DDH Enterprise, Inc., as it is known, began manufacturing cable, harness and mechanical assemblies in 1988 and later evolved into one of the larger electronic manufacturing contractors in Southern California, with 30 percent of its operation in China.
Du attributes his business success to two things: flexibility and being honest.
“You always have to get people to trust you first, to create that trust,” he says. “I put everything on the table.”
At the same time, the company readily adjusts to economic change.
“When one sector is slow, we pick up somewhere else,” Du explains. “After 9/11, everyone suffered. But my business was OK because we diversified. Also, the products we produced were in need – X-ray equipment for airport security,” as well as medical equipment for an expanding health industry. By being involved in so many different facets of manufacturing, “you learn a lot,” said Du.
Du, of Chinese descent, was born in Vietnam. His father, Xuong, fled there in 1947 from China, which at the time was torn apart by revolution
DAVID DU Page 12
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