Built to Rise

Eileen Huarte and her daughter Monica Kennedy watched on television on the afternoon of January 7, 2025, as Los Angeles news outlets reported on a fire in the mountains east of the home Eileen and her husband, John, shared in Pacific Palisades.

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but we were not afraid,” Monica recalls. “We just kept saying it would never come down here.”

That changed very quickly. 

In Southern California, the wind usually moves east from the Pacific. But at times the Santa Anas rise inland and drive west with startling force. On January 7, they roared to 80 miles per hour, rekindling what investigators believe was a small fire extinguished days earlier and sending flames racing through dry brush down the mountains.

By mid-afternoon, evacuation orders reached the Palisades. Residents hurried to gather what they could. John Huarte, Notre Dame’s 1964 Heisman Trophy winner, was traveling, so Monica helped Eileen collect belongings from their home and from her own nearby house. By 4 o’clock in the afternoon, alarm was sounding on their street. 

“I looked around (the house), and I had treasures there,” said Eileen. “My mother was born in Ireland and I had all her pictures from that generation. And everything John and I had from our early years together, notes that we wrote each other. I was a saver, and it was all in the house.”

Many in the Palisades assembled at a hotel in Santa Monica. Within an hour of arriving, the Huartes heard the news: Everything was gone.

Twelve people lost their lives in the fire, and 6,837 buildings were destroyed, including the Huarte’s and Kennedy’s homes.

Recovering would be a challenge for the Huartes, but John had already overcome many challenging situations — from being an unproven quarterback to becoming a Heisman winner, from being a second-round draft choice to becoming a third-string backup to Joe Namath, and from launching a one-man startup to leading a thriving company that today employs a thousand people. 

Like the famous stiff-armed trophy, John Huarte himself has come to symbolize determination, competitive spirit and the will to keep going, despite the opposition.

Nowhere but Notre Dame

Orange County, California, stands adjacent to the sprawling Los Angeles County to the north and to the equally sprawling San Diego County to the south. Its mild climate has made the region ideal for growing citrus. 

Among those who tapped into the fertile ground was John’s father, Joseph. After playing minor league baseball for 10 years — he once played in an exhibition game against New York Yankee greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig — Joseph purchased land near Anaheim and began growing oranges, lemons and avocados. In the 1940s and ’50s, John and his five siblings were their father’s workforce. 

Though they lived 2,090 miles from South Bend, the Huartes, like many Catholic families of the day, were Notre Dame football fans and would listen to Fighting Irish games on the radio on Saturdays while working in the orchard.

Huarte inherited his father’s strong arm and was a standout baseball and football player at Mater Dei High School, the Catholic school in Santa Ana that was and remains an academic and sports powerhouse. The head football coach, Dick Coury, was a 1951 Notre Dame alumnus who early on recognized John’s ability. In his senior year, Huarte led Mater Dei to the 1960 state football championship and, in the process, received attention from the football coaches at Colorado, Oregon, UCLA and others. 

But he knew what he wanted. “I was pretty much set,” he said. “I wanted to go to Notre Dame. My brother (Dave) went there, I’d been listening to Notre Dame games for a number of years as a young kid. So, it was pretty much automatic in my thought process. I didn’t seriously consider the other schools. Notre Dame is where I wanted to go.”

Huarte was also a pitcher on Mater Dei’s baseball team and received an offer from the Yankees during the summer of his junior year of college. As a senior, he played a practical joke by throwing an orange rather than a baseball to a batter on a rival team who also had committed to play football at Notre Dame. “I got kicked out of the game for that,” John remembers. The other player was Jack Snow, someone Huarte would throw to many times when both wore Irish football uniforms. 

Freshmen weren’t eligible to play varsity athletics in the 1960s, so Huarte, Snow and other first-year players in 1961 were not a part of the team’s 5-5 season. As a sophomore and junior, he completed a combined 24 passes in 50 attempts for one touchdown. 

In a preview of the 1964 season, the Notre Dame student magazine Scholastic wrote that a “lack of a consistently good quarterback could again prevent Notre Dame from having a successful season. John Huarte, Dan McGinn, Sandy Vonvechio, Bill Zloch and Tom Longo all return, but none has significant game experience and none is a proven signal-caller. Huarte is the best passer — any of the group could win the job.”

After a 2-7 season in 1963, Notre Dame relieved coach Hugh Devore of his duties and appointed Ara Parseghian as head coach. That changed everything for Irish football — and for Huarte.

“The program was going through a time when it was just disorganized,” Huarte recalled. “Ara came in and straightened that all out, and it didn’t take him very long. He knew what he wanted from different players in different situations.”

One way in which Parseghian evaluated Huarte was by throwing the quarterback into a linebacker drill. During a spring practice at Notre Dame, Huarte was performing well at quarterback when Parseghian unexpectedly ordered him to play middle linebacker in a short-yardage scrimmage. The message was clear: talent and finesse were not enough. He had to prove he was willing to take hits and compete in the trenches. 

The brief but pointed test revealed that leadership required toughness as much as skill — a lesson Huarte would later carry into his career as a businessman, where resilience, adaptability and a willingness to face hard challenges mattered just as much as vision.

When Parseghian decided to make Huarte the starter for the 1964 season, he made sure the unproven senior knew he wouldn’t have to look over his shoulder. “Before the first game, I was walking off the practice field and Ara turns to me and says, “John, I’m going with you. If you make a mistake, don’t worry about it. I’m going with you.’” It was yet another Parseghian lesson that would serve Huarte well in the years to come.

The Heisman and Joe Namath

If John Huarte’s 1964 season were to be pitched to a Hollywood studio, it would have been considered beyond the bounds of believability. The little-used senior quarterback at the nation’s most storied college football program would connect with an equally unheralded wide receiver for school passing and receiving records and nearly win the national championship. 

But it’s all true. Huarte completed 114 passes on 205 attempts for 2,062 yards and 16 touchdowns, breaking the Irish record for passing yards by more than 600. Jack Snow caught 60 of the passes for 1,114 yards and nine touchdowns. The only blemish on the team’s record was a 20-17 loss to the University of Southern California in the season finale, a game that turned on some controversial calls by the officiating crew.

And then to add to that unbelievable script, Huarte won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s premier college football player, with Snow finishing fifth in the voting. Huarte was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2005 and Snow went on to an exceptional career in the NFL with the Los Angeles Rams.

In the early 1960s, the National Football League faced a serious challenge from the upstart American Football League, which routinely drafted and signed top college players. In the 1965 draft, Huarte was the 12th overall selection by the New York Jets of the AFL and the 76th pick of the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL. 

He decided to sign with New York, as did the Jets’ first-round draft choice, one Joe Namath. As the third-string QB, Huarte never played a down with the Jets and was traded after one year to the AFL’s Boston Patriots. Overall, he played primarily as a backup for seven years in the AFL/NFL and two years in the World Football League. He did, however, get the upper hand on Namath in one important way.

As Eileen recalled, she was attending St. John’s University at night and working various jobs, including as an elevator operator at Shea Stadium, where the Jets played. Someone told her Joe Namath wanted to ask her out, and though he tried three times, she wasn’t interested in dating a football player. 

Then John stepped onto her elevator on his way to the stadium’s Diamond Club. He lingered, riding up and down before finally asking her out. She said, “yes.” Nearly 60 years later, they are still together.

Asking out Eileen in the elevator wasn’t the only off-field activity John pursued.

Life After Football

While professional athletes in the 1960s earned more money than the average worker, it was nothing even close to the tens of millions paid today. That meant most held jobs in the off-season. Huarte did as well, but always with an eye on his life after pro football.

A Notre Dame management major, Huarte had worked in a bank and as a broker on Wall Street before earning his real estate and broker’s licenses in California. After retiring from football following the 1975 season, he became intrigued by the ceramic tile in the homes he was showing. Much of the tile was imported from Italy.

A trip overseas, where he saw vast inventories and untapped potential, convinced him that the distribution and sales of Italian tile could be his next chapter. He worked briefly for a group of companies in Italy, but then decided to strike out on his own and began importing tile, hauling it by truck to San Diego and selling it. 

“In our first year (1977), after paying myself a salary, we made a profit — $30,000 or $35,000,” Huarte recalled. “That was very encouraging and I said, ‘This works, let’s keep doing it.’” He soon started to truck tile to Phoenix, and then to Tucson. 

Huarte named the company Arizona Tile and expanded it steadily, guided by three core principles shaped by his early career in banking, real estate and on Wall Street. His training in property appraisal helped him choose strong locations, which he believed accounted for a third of a branch’s success. The remaining value, he maintained, came equally from quality materials and capable people.

The personnel who lead the company today are multiple family members. While John has stepped down from day-to-day oversight, Joe Kennedy, Monica’s husband, is the company’s president. Mark Huarte directs overseas operations, Matt Huarte directs the real estate division, and Monica and her sisters work on the marketing side. “It’s been a very rewarding family business,” said Huarte.

The company now employs some 1,000 people in 30 stores across 13 western and southwestern states. They sell more than 300 varieties of granite, marble, quartzite, limestone and travertine slabs, and tile primarily to contractors, builders and fabrication shops.

Throughout his business career, Huarte has always remembered the lessons he learned from sports and from Parseghian, such as sometimes throwing an employee into a linebacker drill — so to speak — to challenge them, and sticking with them when they make mistakes. “Most people have been involved in sports,” he said. “Maybe not a Heisman or anything, but involved in sports. You learn a lot from sports about teamwork. I’ve noticed that over the years, people who work for us — and who are very successful — have had a good background in teamwork and played a sport, both men and women.”

Huarte chose to keep the private company’s earnings private, though now, after nearly 50 years in business, he can look with pride on what he, his family members and their colleagues have built.

“We’re doing well,” he said, “and hopefully we’ll continue to grow. It’s been profitable and it’s been great.”

Still Inspiring

After the Huartes saw that their home in Pacific Palisades had been destroyed by the fire in January, they relocated to a rental property in Newport Beach, on the coast and, for John, back to Orange County. They’re planning to buy a new home in the area to be close to their youngest grandchildren.

They lost most of their possessions to the fire, their “lifetime of memories,” as Monica put it. But one of their most valuable belongings, the 1964 Heisman Trophy itself, is safe, serving as an inspiration to young people. 

“It’s at Mater Dei High School,’ John said. “It’s been there for a number of years. I thought that was an appropriate place for it.” 

2026 Magazine Issue