Neighborhood Legend

Jim Hastings Showed How Community Service Works

Jim Hastings didn’t need to start a magazine. He was almost 70 with a lifetime of accomplishments. But in 1996, having lost a longshot campaign for mayor, Hastings and his wife Cecily embarked on a new career as publishers.

They had no experience in journalism, communications or publishing. Technology was poised to crush the cozy universe of printed news. The Hastings looked ahead and saw only blue skies.

The rapid transition from mayoral candidate to novice publisher proved Jim Hastings wasn’t intimidated by shifting terrain.

arrived in Sacramento and settled near McKinley Park.

By R.E. Graswich

Jim, who died in January at age 94, days after falling on an East Sacramento sidewalk, spent two decades helping Inside Sacramento defy economic gravity. The magazine thrived. It became a local institution, arriving at 83,000 homes each month, free to everyone, delivered by U.S mail, supported by community advertisers. It’s the magazine you’re reading now.

As a teenager, he spent nights in Florida ballrooms working as a professional dancer. He brought adolescent companionship to women whose husbands and boyfriends were busy fighting World War II. He eventually left the dance floor and found his own battlefields in Korea as a soldier in the U.S. Marine Corps.

For decades, he moved often and never had time to sink roots. This explains why Jim believed his greatest achievements came after 1989, when he

The East Sac community, its trees, parks, narrow streets, provincial shops, pleasant neighbors and visitors, formed the hometown he always imagined and never experienced.

Jim embraced his new community. He launched himself into the minutiae of neighborhood drama. He led campaigns to slow traffic on G and H streets. He organized residents to stop an oversized office building from replacing a church on Alhambra Boulevard. With Cecily, he founded a neighborhood association for McKinley Park and started the East Sacramento Chamber of Commerce.