Elizabeth Valentina was in college four decades ago when she saw the canopied stretch of Fair Oaks Boulevard. Here, she imagined, is my future home.
“I thought, someday I’m living on this stretch,” she says.
Valentina married, raised two sons in Fair Oaks and became a single mom after a divorce. With her boys preparing for Jesuit High School, she wanted a home closer to the tree-lined boulevard from her college memories.
But this house was far from perfect.
With his years on City Council and the state Assembly, Kevin McCarty brings more than two decades of elected public service to the mayor’s office.
He says being mayor requires a different perspective.
After 15 months in his new job, McCarty invited me to City Hall for what he called a “one-year check-in.” We discussed homelessness, Downtown’s recovery, government efficiency and what surprised him most about being mayor.
We began with homelessness. “There’s no question it’s the issue I deal with every day,” McCarty says.
Camille VandenBerge’s sculptures seem to step from a story in progress. Elongated figures tilt their heads, lift an arm or lean toward an unseen companion. They are human yet otherworldly, poised between motion and stillness, imagination and memory. Listen close. Their presence begins to speak.
“Words are not my medium,” VandenBerge says. “Clay is and paint is.”
That instinctive clarity guides her life’s work. VandenBerge grew up in a household where art was a daily language, not an extracurricular activity. She’s the daughter of ceramic sculptor Peter VandenBerge, a respected figure in Sacramento’s nationally influential clay community.
Long before youth sports became a year-round industry of travel teams, elite training and escalating costs, Bill Campbell believed athletics should be something simple and more powerful: a place where young people learn discipline, teamwork and confidence, regardless of background or income.
That belief became the foundation of Rio Del Oro Sports Club, one of Sacramento’s most enduring and influential youth sports organizations.
In February, I wrote “30 Years in Print,” recalling how Inside Sacramento began as a neighborhood experiment and grew into the largest print circulation publication in Northern California, with 80,000 copies of each monthly issue delivered to homes, helping to define our community.
The milestone was celebratory and sobering.
For three decades, Inside Sacramento has been 100% advertising supported. We don’t charge for the magazine. No subscription requirements or paywalls. Our model is simple. Local businesses invest in reaching local readers. We deliver high-quality journalism, storytelling and photography to the neighborhoods we share.
But the media landscape has changed.
