If you need something cleaned, ask Nana Mary. Need something cut or copied, ask Nana Mary. Something fixed, laminated or drilled, ask Nana Mary.
Pretty much anything at all, ask Nana Mary.
Mary Bennick—everyone calls her Nana Mary—has volunteered at Theodore Judah Elementary School in East Sacramento for nearly 10 years. She arrived when granddaughter Lillian began transitional kindergarten.
The heavy metal trap clamped down on the opossum’s neck with the power of a jackhammer.
Spring-loaded to deliver deadly force, the trap drove the young marsupial over a wood fence separating two Elk Grove homes where he hung for 24 hours before the neighbor called for help.
The old-style, body-gripping device “crushed his esophagus,” says Sandra Foreman, animal care manager with the Wildlife Care Association of Sacramento. “It was tight around his neck, like someone strangling you.”
It’s fitting that the name for Angela Borge’s all-natural bath- and body-care company came from her parents’ garden.
“I had been wanting to start an herbal business, but the names I’d come up with just weren’t connecting,” the Sacramento native says. “Then I was outside at my parents’ house in East Sac and suddenly heard ‘Humble Bee Herbal’ in my head. It was perfect.”
Borge is a devotee of natural skincare, mostly out of necessity. An almond intolerance led her to study herbalism and make her own skincare for years. But it wasn’t until she joined forces with her mom Jeanine, a retired third-grade teacher, when Humble Bee Herbal took off.
Alice Astafan has a story to tell. “Not many people are born on a cotton farm and get to the Pentagon,” the Carmichael resident says.
From her humble start to lofty success in the U.S. Air Force, Astafan is the rare woman who reached the rank of major general. Her second star made her the first and only woman reservist—including all service branches—to attain the two-star rank at that time.
Astafan’s memoir, “Lady Leader Leaves Lasting Legacy: From the Cotton Patch to the Pentagon and Beyond,” was published last November by AuthorHouse. The book tracks her life from a farm in Oakman, Alabama, a town of about 800, to the heights of military service.
“I loved my upbringing, but I didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife for the rest of my life,” Astafan, 85, says.
Le’la Aaron hesitated when her older sister Adina encouraged her to join Breakthrough Sacramento. Who wants to go to school during the summer? But the decision to join the tuition-free college preparatory program changed her life.
“Breakthrough was the most helpful in that I got extra attention and I had more time to understand each topic before it was brought up in the classroom the next year, so I was already somewhat ahead,” says Aaron, a UC Davis freshman.
For 30 years, Breakthrough Sacramento has provided intensive, six-week academic programs during the summer for under-resourced students in seventh through 12th grades on the campus of Sacramento Country Day School.
