Interesting People

When the Ankers arrived in Curtis Park in the middle of the night after driving from Los Angeles with a U-Haul, their cat and two kids, they smiled and hugged each other.

“We knew we’d landed in the right place,” Dr. Thomas Anker says of the home his family occupies down the street from Omic Wellness, the medical practice he and his wife, Julia, opened a year ago on Freeport Boulevard.

“We love it here,” Sacramento native Julia concurs. “It’s such a tight-knit community with a small-town feel—we know all of our neighbors and say hi on the street. It’s those little things that make living in this area so great.”

Terry a O’Neal is the consummate storyteller. During our nearly two-hour interview, she regales me with stories about young motherhood, awakening her writer’s voice, going through a traumatic divorce, advocating for youth and more.

She talks about her mother, a Southern Creole poet who inspired her daughter’s creative career. She tells of the complex characters that populate her poetry and prose. By the end of the call, it feels like we’ve only scratched the surface of the artist and human being that is Terry a O’Neal.

“I credit my mother for everything,” says O’Neal, raised in Stockton by her mother, Barbara Ann Tillman-Williams, a native of Louisiana who moved to California in the 1970s but reared O’Neal and her three siblings as if they were still in the south.

When Rivkah Sass retired last month as director and CEO of the Sacramento Public Library, she left behind a list of accomplishments that could fill, well, a book.

But make no mistake. Just because she retired doesn’t mean the tireless Sass will be less busy.

“I have other adventures to be determined,” she says. “My No. 1 priority will be spending time with my two new grandchildren who live in Idaho—Facetime is nice but it’s not the same as cuddling two squirmy, stinky boys.

“No. 2 on my list is to get certified to teach English as a foreign language so I can do more work with the Zaatari refugee camp on the Syrian border. There’s also my guilty pleasure, the Isle of Wight Donkey Sanctuary. I plan to go there to volunteer. I also want to learn to read music. And, of course, I plan to consult with libraries, since they’re my passion.”

Rekhi Singh’s motto is simple: “Happy people are more successful.”

Singh is on a mission to help everyone find wellbeing through happiness. He has founded programs and centers around the world to study of the science of happiness—including one at his alma mater, Sacramento State.

“Whatever you do unhappily, you can do it better if done happily,” says Singh, a native of India who moved to Singapore at age 30 and then to Sacramento in 1987 to earn his MBA. “Happy people are more successful than the other way around. A meaningful life is where you feel connected and help others.”

In 1984, a group of singers formed the Sacramento Gay Men’s Chorus to provide a safe place for gay men to meet and make music as the AIDS epidemic began to rage.

That same year, Lynda Walls was in Washington state managing and promoting bands at the start of the grunge movement, while “doing everything from stuffing envelopes to organizing marches” as an AIDS-awareness activist.

Little did Walls know that decades later, she would become executive director of the chorus that provides a voice—in more ways than one—for more than 100 LGBTQ residents of the Sacramento area.