The Abridged version:
- Abridged by PBS KVIE is publishing a collection of brief profiles and vignettes highlighting the people — seen but often overlooked — who make up the fabric of the community.
- Each weekday through the end of September we will publish a new story, 12 in all, introducing you to someone who quietly makes the Sacramento region all it is.
- Each piece on its own is a window into a person and place, a unique but relatable moment in time or sense of place. Together, the stories offer insights into parts of life in this region you may otherwise have never known.
Abridged by PBS KVIE started a year ago with a mission of serving the community with local journalism not covered elsewhere. With our latest project, “Meet your neighbors,” we hope to have done just that.
More than 1,000 stories published since launching have shared news that matters, shining a light on untold stories and bringing more information to the public. Building on that, we wanted to find a way to focus on the people who make this community what it is, who may not find themselves appearing in the news otherwise.
We looked for stories that speak to something universal, showing us more about who we are and the community in which we live.
We decided to embark on another ambitious endevour: crafting a collection of brief profiles and vignettes highlighting the people — seen but often overlooked — who make up the fabric of the community.
Each weekday through the end of September we will publish a new story, 12 in all, introducing you to someone who quietly makes the Sacramento region all it is. A face you may have seen and wondered about the person behind.
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Each piece on its own is a window into a person and place, a unique but relatable moment in time or sense of place. Together, the stories offer insights into parts of life in this region you may otherwise have never known.
You’ll learn about someone who tries to make everything, within the orbit of her life, a little bit better. A young person coming of age, building on his youth in Sacramento to strengthen the community he grew to love, despite its faults.
We’ll share stories of life on a farm in Placer County, and the consistency behind a loaf of bread from a midtown bakery.
Through each story you’ll learn something new about your community. By the end, you’ll see this collection of strangers as something more: neighbors.
As we publish each piece, you’ll find links to them on this page.
Keep scrolling to meet your neighbors.
Meet your neighbors
Through the end of September, we’re celebrating the people who, every day, make life in the Sacramento region meaningful and interesting. Through 12 stories, a collection of short profiles, you’ll “Meet your neighbors.”
She cares for kids all day and night. Still, this Elk Grove woman gives more
BY FELICIA ALVAREZ | falvarez@kvie.org
Every morning, Janice Lal and Stash journey 42 steps.
They walk past rows of stucco-clad townhomes and neatly trimmed hedges, savoring the warm valley sun overhead. In this little corner of Elk Grove, Stash, a 2-year-old sulcata tortoise, and Janice are a familiar pair.
Neighbors stoop down to greet Stash before heading to work. When a delivery driver appears, Janice points them to the cabinet of treats she set up in a small alcove by her door.
For Janice, it’s a moment of peace, before reentering the fray of everyday life …
New Roma baker practices ‘a lost art’ as Midtown Sacramento changes around him
BY JAKE GOODRICK | jgoodrick@kvie.org
A light stays on through the night at the bakery on the corner of 18th and E streets.
Inside, heat builds in the brick oven, holding warmth from late at night until its door opens early in the morning.
That’s when Tim Costa cranks open the oven door, revealing the chamber carved into the back wall of New Roma Bakery.
The 68-year-old retrieves a board full of unbaked loaves and reaches for the long wooden peel racked above his head. He spreads flour across the oar, and some gently falls past his white apron, onto his black sneakers, where a layer already exists from the late nights and early mornings before …
A Southern California transplant continues the family legacy of a Placer County farm
By MEGAN VAZ | mvaz@kvie.org
Cruising past stone fruit trees and melon patches, Justin Miller, 52, leans his wrist over the wheel, noting hints of orange wafting from young mandarin leaves.
“If you literally just stop —” he says as the ATV jolts to a halt and its blaring engine quiets, “— you listen to this place.”
A chorus of chirping rings through the air. Justin taps his ear, his finger landing beside a sparkling stud.
From the precision with which he twists his hand to pluck peaches and the methodical system he uses to monitor the farm’s water pressure meter, you’d believe he’s been farming his entire life …
From Nigeria to Sacramento, this caterer brings West African cuisine to your table
By NATACHI MEZ | Community reporter
“I don’t do catering anymore,” Lilian Ofoma of Lilyz Catering claimed after she and her husband opened up an elderly home during the pandemic.
Yet cooking couldn’t stay away from Ofoma as much as Ofoma couldn’t stay away from cooking.
The oldest girl of six siblings growing up in Nigeria, Ofoma was expected to cook alongside her mother, but it was more than just a duty for her. By 11, she loved to cook and impressed her family with her skills, so much so that her younger sister gave her the moniker “Lily Hotels.” …
Native Californian shows how the Sacramento region once was, and sometimes still is
By DANIEL HENNESSY | dhennessy@kvie.org
Diana Almendariz sees her grandmother everywhere.
In the exposed root systems along the banks of the Sacramento River, where the sedge roots can grow more than a dozen feet long and be used for weaving. In acorns leeching tannic acid as they’re made edible. In the upriver sighting of the occasional sea lion, introduced to her long ago as a passing friend.
These are memories, visits from someone who left this earthly plane years ago. But there’s also something alive about them — real and relevant lessons entrusted to Almendariz by the woman who took her under her wing when she was a child.
Decades later, the space below Almendariz’s own wing is crowded. Her daughters, Christina and Ooti, are there, along with many others …
High school senior brings South Sacramento upbringing and activism to school board role
By SAVANNAH KUCHAR | skuchar@kvie.org
For Owen Naqica, there isn’t another place like Sacramento.
Maybe because he’s lived here all his life — all 17 years of it. He’s the first to concede he still has a lot of the world to see.
But, he swears, there’s just something special about the city he has always called home.
“People here smile more at each other.”
The son of Fijian immigrants and the older brother to a now high school freshman, Naqica holds family close to heart. Family, to him, also includes neighbors, especially those in his South Sacramento community.
He grew up calling those living next door aunty, uncle and cousin, even though they weren’t related. His family traded persimmons for oranges through their backyard fence.
Yet the same city that inspired him to be neighborly also, in his own words, radicalized him …
She searched for home and found it in Sacramento, with a pit bull outside the Capitol
By AARON LEATHLEY | aleathley@kvie.org
Government staffers stride past the domed Capitol building under a gray afternoon sky. So does Dayse Baba, in her flared magenta dress.
She stands out. So does Stormy, Baba’s elderly pit bull, dressed like a toddler at a recital in a neon-green tutu and matching headband.
“She has seven different tutu colors,” Baba says. “One for each day of the week.”
Baba adopted Stormy from the Sacramento SPCA, where the dog had gone unadopted for years.
Baba knows what it’s like to be searching for home …
From the isolating business of adult boutiques to community and coffee in Sacramento
By ROB STEWART | rstewart@kvie.org
Every morning, Joseph Long is at Temple Coffee on H Street in East Sacramento before much of the city gets moving.
He gets there no later than 6 a.m. and may stay three or four hours.
Some days the same people are there. Other days, the mix changes. Someone leaves, someone else pulls up a chair. There are retirees, professionals, people working on laptops and people simply talking.
Over time, it became Joseph’s community — something he was not even looking for.
For more than two decades, Joseph owned and operated the Kiss and Tell adult boutiques in the Sacramento area, businesses his father started when Joseph was still in high school. He took them over at 23. Last year, he closed them.
Online shopping changed the business. Shoplifting became a problem. And Joseph says the stores became more isolating.
A few years before closing, a friend suggested meeting for coffee at Temple. Joseph showed up — and has been going ever since …
A Sacramento artist who sees creativity in disability
By BRIANNA TAYLOR | btaylor@kvie.org
Paul Basye discovered his artistic style in the middle of the night.
“(Artists) work and work, and they kind of make stuff that doesn’t go anywhere,” he said. “Say what you want, my stuff kind of goes someplace.”
A white, collared Polo shirt with frayed edges where sleeves once hung. Unpretentious denim-washed jeans. Well-loved sandals. The self-assurance emanating from the 63-year-old comes decades after searching for his lane. School was hard. Making it as an artist was harder.
With his 40th birthday pattering at his door, Basye got his first real break as an art teacher at a nonprofit serving adults with developmental disabilities in Sacramento. He spent a decade helping people make art before eventually pivoting to a similar gig at Short Center Arts in Lemon Hill …
The Clarksburg garage where Japanese American lives and history won’t be forgotten
By DANIEL HENNESSY | dhennessy@kvie.org
If history is a collection of stories, Steve Hiromoto is a library.
His garage in Clarksburg, where his family has lived for four generations, is full of boxes that aren’t his.
For the most part, they’ve come from people who didn’t know what to do with them. Comprised of old family photos, records and memorabilia, they’re physical pieces of lives once lived in and around the Delta.
Too valuable to throw away, but taking up room on a shelf.
So, they come to Hiromoto …
Helping the Sacramento region see the stars from a community foothills observatory
By JAMES SMITH | Community reporter
Gordon Dolfie thrives on showing the light of the cosmos to others — but dodges the spotlight himself.
He’s the head volunteer docent at the Placer Community Observatory, located at the Folsom Lake College, El Dorado Center campus, where Rotary Club of Cameron Park opened its free, all-volunteer observatory in 2006.
“It’s amazing to be able to give people an appreciation of where we fit into the larger universe,” he said. “You see the sense of wonder on peoples’ faces.”
Dolfie insists on not taking personal credit for the work he does at the observatory.
“I’m representing the work of this whole organization,” he said, noting that he works side by side with a diverse, intergenerational group of 60 volunteers, “Everyone from local high school students to passionate residents in their 80s,” he said …
By day, he’s an at-risk youth advocate. By night? A wrestling villain
By MEGAN VAZ | mvaz@kvie.org
As his partner taps him back into the ring, Preston Doyle, 26, swings his body under the rope, squaring his feet to meet his opponent. A chorus of children boo and shriek as he executes a theatrically-choreographed body slam, which only makes him laugh.
“I don’t hear you now!” he calls back, cupping his ear with his hand.
Spectators packed into the patio of Auburn’s Crooked Lane Brewery may be surprised to learn that by day, the tattooed wrestler throwing punches and taunting children before them is a soft-spoken social worker who cares for youth across Placer County.
Because tonight, Preston Doyle is “Preston Price,” one half of a tag team duo defending their Pacific Pro Wrestling league belts. They’re also the villains of the match, infamous for playing dirty and cheating …
Check back tomorrow for more or follow us on Instagram.
