Content area
Full text
Sacramento, particularly its midtown area, made an impression on Peter Keat when he was an undergraduate at UC Davis. He went off to Indiana for graduate school and worked in Florida for a while, but when he thought about where he wanted to live for the rest of his life, he knew it was midtown Sacramento, and in 1975 he returned.
He also knew he wanted to be involved in the community. He has been.
Keat, owner of Time Tested Books at 1114 21st St., has served on the board of the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op three times since 1981, was first elected to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District board in 1988, and this year, for the third time, he is the board president.
"I have no further political aspirations," he said. "I'm happy where I am, with my life the way it is now. My community involvement is part-time, and that's all I want it to be. The balance in my life is something I cherish. I'd lose that if I became a fulltime politician. Also, I don't want to rise to the level of my incompetence.
"In the future I might like to get involved with other community activities, public radio, for example."
SMUD, he believes, is doing an outstanding job for utility users in Sacramento County "and a few homes in Placer County.
"Sacramento wasn't hit hard by the energy crisis, " Keat said, "because SMUD had exempted itself from the deregulation passed by the Legislature until we determined that it would work. As it turned out, it was a winning strategy, given how deregulation was bungled."
BACKGROUND
*Age: 55
*Native of: New York City; raised in San Jose
*Residence: Sacramento
*Education: BA, history and sociology, UC Davis; MA., sociology, Indiana University
*Family: Wife Miriam Davis; stepdaughter Maraya Cornell
COMING TO SACRAMENTO
Attractive, interesting: "I had left graduate school and had taken a job, my first job, at the University of Miami medical school as a researcher in the field of drug abuse. I wanted to come back to the Sacramento-Davis area, where I had friends, and to be close to my family in San Jose.
"I had gone to school in Davis, and was very familiar with Sacramento and thought...