The runners cut through the pre-dawn stillness, traveling in near perfect cadence through the streets of Oak Park. At the head of the pack, Kevin Johnson sets a brisk pace as he calls out curt warnings of passing cars and speed bumps.

It is 4:30 a.m. on a Thursday, and Johnson's day is well under way. The next 15 hours are scheduled to the minute. There are interviews for staff positions, city officials to debrief, reporters who have questions.

"It's good to be back in the neighborhood, good to be back on these streets," Johnson, 42, tells the seven other runners, most of them advisers on his mayoral transition team. "This is where it all started."

Today, for all intents and purposes, Kevin Maurice Johnson, native son of this gritty neighborhood, becomes Sacramento's 55th mayor. Though he won't take the formal oath of office until next Tuesday – the Nov. 4 election results won't be certified until then – Johnson and his supporters will direct a theatrical induction gala at downtown's Memorial Auditorium starting at 6:45 p.m.

The party, complete with fireworks, a gospel choir and as many as 3,000 guests, will celebrate what advisers say will be a new direction for Sacramento as Johnson succeeds two-term Mayor Heather Fargo.

The fanfare is a marked departure for City Hall. Johnson, too, marks a departure, in his management style and the attention he is expected to bring to Sacramento politics.

He has spent most of his life in the spotlight, first as one of the state's top high school basketball players and eventually as a college and NBA star. When his playing days ended, he returned to Sacramento, where his efforts as a developer and educator have sparked both adulation and controversy.

As he prepares to enter this next phase, Johnson says the daily lessons he received inside a modest single-story home in Oak Park shaped the man he is today.

Raised by his grandparents

Johnson, like many who grew up around him in Oak Park, wasn't dealt an easy hand.

He was born to a 16-year-old mother. His father, Lawrence Johnson, drowned in the Sacramento River when Johnson was 3.

And so Kevin Johnson's grandparents – George and Georgia Peat – took him and his young mother into their home on 16th Avenue. When his mother, Georgia West, moved out to pursue a nursing degree at Sacramento City College, Johnson stayed.

"My mom was just getting on her feet, going to school, starting to become a nurse, and it was just easier," Johnson said last week, outside the home where he was raised. "She lived in the same community about a mile away, so I saw my mom all the time. But it was just easier; it was a little more stable."

The Peats were white. According to a 1997 profile in the Arizona Republic, Georgia Peat was pregnant by another man when she married her husband and gave birth to Johnson's mother, who is African American.

Johnson wouldn't discuss this aspect of his grandparents' life. But he said his mixed-race upbringing was "never a factor. We were a community."

He referred to the diversity of his family, Oak Park and the public schools he attended. "You learn to respect people from every different background and culture and ethnicity."

Johnson's grandfather was a sheet-metal worker who woke at 6:05 every morning; it was George Peat, Johnson said, who taught him about structure and work ethic.

"That was very important, because a lot of people in my community didn't have that structure," said Johnson. "There weren't the male influences in a lot of the households."

Johnson has just two memories of his father. He remembers visiting Lawrence Johnson's family and looking at photographs, and a night he and his father were walking down 35th Street in Oak Park when gunshots rang out.

"I remember my father putting my head down and protecting me," he said.

Johnson credits his grandmother for instilling the importance of manners, forcing him to write thank-you notes the day after Christmas every year. She taught him to "be thankful, be friendly," Johnson said.

Call The Bee's Ryan Lillis, (916) 321-1085.