This year marks the 25th anniversary of Inside Sacramento. At a time when print publishing has been decimated, my husband Jim and I feel grateful to have survived and thrived.
Today, a new publication like Inside would be called a “micro” business. In 1996, we divided the tasks based on the experiences and success of our previous careers. My career was in interior design and project management. My strengths were writing, graphic design, sales, marketing and community involvement. Jim handled accounting, payroll, printing, delivery, invoicing and business details. He had been an executive for IBM and a small business manager.
What made Inside unique was our motivation. Neither of us had publishing experience.
In 2006, my husband Jim and I embarked on a dream-of-a-lifetime project. My career prior to publishing was interior design, and I always wanted to design and build a home from scratch. Before the age of 30, I had already bought, rehabbed and sold four houses. When we moved to McKinley Park in 1989, we remodeled a lovely circa 1925 Tudor home over the course of 16 years.
While my wish to design and build was brewing, Jim made it clear he loved our home, our street and our neighborhood. He’d worked for IBM and was transferred every few years. Now he wanted to put down roots. And as luck would have it, we both were able to find satisfaction.
Lost among the election reports was some of the best national economic news ever. The October federal employment report showed 906,000 jobs were added in the private sector, with an increase of 724,000 jobs to the labor force. Wages were up 4.5 percent. Unemployment dropped dramatically across every demographic group.
The federal government said the gross domestic product—the measure of total economic output—grew by a record-setting 7.4 percent between July and September, or 33.1 percent on an annualized basis. The economy grew at a pace never seen before. This is what economists call a V-shaped recovery.
Anyone who reaches 100 and is still active has mastered the art of aging. But to reach an advanced age and work every day, stay sharp, physically active and self-sufficient puts you in another category—what gerontologists call “super-agers.”
Sacramento artist Wayne Thiebaud is the ultimate super-ager of today’s art world. He’s famous around the world for creating colorful paintings and drawings of commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries and hot dogs—and for landscapes and figure paintings.
In 1996, California voters approved a citizen-sponsored initiative—Proposition 209—that added the following words to the California Constitution: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin, in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”
Dr. Carl Shin has made a career of bucking the traditional medical establishment when it comes to pain management.
“After managing chronic pain for 20 years, I’ve discovered that I’m in a field where we do the same things over and over without really getting results. Since outcome and results don’t seem to drive the pain-management business, I sought a better way,” Shin says.
