SAN JOSE–Forty years after his colorful demonstration spurred Sacramento to finish the “Monument to Nowhere,” the freeway ramps that late City Councilman Joe Colla made famous will now bear his name.

“Joe Colla pulled off one of the greatest stunts in Bay Area history and quickly got the attention of leaders in Sacramento,” said one of his biggest fans, Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese.

On Friday afternoon, Cortese joined a crowd of some three dozen Colla family members and others for a ceremony naming the Highway 101-Interstate 280-680 interchange after Colla, who died in 1995, leaving behind a proud and witty example of peaceful, civil disobedience.

“Joe Colla, in a sense, was the original disrupter,” Cortese said, who risked the wrath of powerful state officials and their local allies.

There’s no question now that Colla and his co-conspirators shamed mighty Caltrans and then-Gov. Jerry Brown — during his first stint in the state Capitol — to get back to work on the freeway project. The publicity stunt in January 1976, in which Colla posed for a photograph on top of the then unfinished interchange, focused national attention on California’s highway problems. In today’s e-lingo, Colla’s photograph went viral.

Back then, nobody driving Highway 101 through San Jose could miss the concrete, isolated, truncated, X-shaped ramps. They were infuriating eyesores to many irate taxpayers and commuters. To others, they were abstract sculpture, hanging metaphors for bureaucratic incompetence, arrogance, or both.

Exactly who thought up the stunt, how they pulled it off and what role Colla played became clouded with time. It now seems, according to Mercury News columnist Scott Herhold, that others came up with the idea of putting something on the interchange. First it was a poster of a car and then a real car.

The players included Tom Carter, a union representative, and Velma Million, a community activist. They recruited others to help — union rep Don Incardona, construction executives Doug Beatty and Charlie Giguero, crane operator Bob Marr, and a host of brawny hard hats. Union leader Mike Kraynick recruited Colla, a leading critic of Caltrans at the time, to be the poster boy waving his arms next to the old Chevy.

Some of these co-conspirators attended the ceremony at the Center for Training and Careers near the city zoo at Kelley Park and a few blocks from today’s bustling interchange. All of them endorsed naming the interchange after Colla.

“Without him breaking the rules, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” said Amanda Tugwell, a granddaughter who live in San Francisco. “He really knew what was needed to get something done.”

Colla’s daughter, Colette Blakely was a teen when her father came home one night and told the family, “don’t answer the phone, don’t open the door, you don’t know what happened.”

She learned from the news reports, and was proud of him.

“I loved it,” Blakely said.

Former state Assemblyman Joe Coto, D-San Jose, sponsored the state legislation in 2010 naming the interchange after Colla.

After the stunt made him famous, Colla organized a caravan of hundreds of cars to drive to Sacramento to successfully lobby for the Interchange completion. Still, his fame was fleeting. Colla lost his bid for re-election in 1978.

Velma Million, 96, the only one of Colla’s original co-conspirators at Friday’s ceremony, said that she’s “thrilled that he’s being honored in this wonderful way.”

She joked that the car, “got a ticket for parking on a freeway — We had to go to court!”

Million added that soon after, Gov. Brown called someone in the know and said, “Get that car off and the man with it!”

Contact Joe Rodriguez at jrodriguez@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5767. Twitter.com/JoeRodMercury.