Meet Your Neighbor
Wheel Of Fortune
About 50 years ago, Tracy Broshar defied her mother and bought a motorcycle. The riding hobby eventually became a family affair. It also saved Broshar’s life.
Much has happened since the East Sacramento woman, at age 18, purchased a Honda XL75, a small bike built for trail riding.
Since then, Broshar, 67, has bought several motorcycles. She also overcame physical limitations prompted by a motorcycle crash and persevered through the loss of a long-time partner and personal despair.
At Your Fingertips
Society for the Blind’s Braille Production & Training Program has one principle.
“Braille is literacy,” says Jill Guilbeau, program manager and lead Braille instructor. “You can read digital books, but that’s not reading. To be able to sit down and read a book in braille, it’s powerful to me because you’re using your skills to read. It’s part of being independent.”
For more than 70 years, Society for the Blind has offered programming to help blind and low-vision youth, adults and seniors lead more independent lives.
When the opportunity arrived to acquire Sacramento Braille Transcribers in 2021, the society jumped at the chance.
Never 2-Late
Linda Franzoia met Erick Feil at Club 2-Me, the East Sacramento pub. She was a customer. He was a bartender and general manager for Club 2-Me’s owners, the Mier family. It was a long time ago.
Erick and Linda fell in love and got married. Life evolved with complex histories of families and friends, stories of bartenders and the lore shared by neighborhood bars.
They owned Lucky Café in Midtown and opened Stingers Sports Pub on La Riviera Drive. Erick died in 2018. Now Linda runs Stingers, which celebrates its 33rd anniversary in July.
Through it all, she never forgot about Club 2-Me.
Light Touch
Dr. David Lehman’s medical practice is on the third floor of a J Street office building in East Sacramento. Melodies from a piano lesson business across the hallway greet visitors. Other doors in the drab corridor have placards without names.
But enter Lehman’s office and the small waiting area becomes a portal to the physician’s work. He’s a beacon, patients and staff say.
Lehman is the keeper of an estimated 400 lighthouses. Every wall, shelf, cabinet and exam room is adorned in a watchtower motif. Every bric-a-brac, figurine, painting, poster, tapestry and tchotchke has its own beacon.
Rave Review
For Margaret Kane, the story of Sacramento’s Music Circus isn’t just history. It’s something that needed capturing before it slipped away.
Her new book, “Broadway Sacramento: 75 Years of Theater Magic,” is the result of that urgency. What began as an idea in 2023 grew into a two-and-a-half-year labor of research, writing, design and production.
“I felt a real urgency to preserve these stories while the people who lived them were still here to tell them,” Kane says.
Memory Lane
Jeffrey Mason thinks everyone has an amazing life story.
His belief led the Elk Grove resident and retired state employee to build a $12 million-a-year business that started from a personal place.
“I took for granted that my mom and dad would always be in my life,” Mason says. “We would visit a couple times a year and talk on the phone a lot, but distance still happens. I was in my 50s when my dad started feeling the effects of Alzheimer’s.”
