Carolyn Slobe, matriarch who helped Old Sacramento secure railroad museum, dies at 91
Carolyn Dean Johnston Slobe, an understated Sacramento philanthropist and an integral figure in turning the California State Railroad Museum into a reality, died Friday morning. She was 91.
“She was indefatigable,” her son Bob Slobe told The Sacramento Bee by phone. “She cut a broad swath in Sacramento.”
Carolyn Slobe, born Aug. 19, 1929, was a co-founder of the Sacramento Trust for Historic Preservation, which worked to restore Old Sacramento.
When the trust hosted then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan for a dinner on the Gold Coast train car to secure the governor’s commitment to fund the railroad museum, it was Carolyn Slobe who set the table with her best china and tablecloth, and Bob Slobe and his high school friends serving as waiters.
Slobe was an active volunteer and philanthropist, focusing much of her time and attention on her home neighborhood of Woodlake, but also giving generously to the Crocker Art Museum and Sacramento History Museum. She also helped out at the Sacramento Children’s Home.
“Mom and her mother and my father were all very active in a lot of charities,” Slobe’s daughter, Wendy Blakemore, recalled. “We’d tag along and be little helpers.”
She once quietly paid a friend’s college tuition. She learned braille so she could convert books for blind people, her son said.
“She was always just kind of a doer,” said Blakemore.
A native of North Sacramento, Slobe graduated from Grant High School at age 16 and went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Stanford in 1950. She married Robert John Slobe the following year.
She gave birth to their first child, Gary, in Mexico City in 1952, where Slobe earned her master’s degree in Latin American studies. The family returned to North Sacramento later that year and had three more children, and they also raised Slobe’s nephew, Steven James.
Robert Slobe died in 1971, at age 43. Carolyn Slobe succeeded her mother, Myrtle Dean Johnston, who died within three months of Robert’s passing, as president of the North Sacramento Land Co., which was founded in 1910 and worked for years to redevelop Del Paso Boulevard and other parts of the region. Slobe remained in that role until 2007, when her son Bob Slobe took the helm.
Bob Slobe said his mother and grandmother ran the family business for a combined 53 years of its 103-year history.
“So thinking about the fact that women in real estate were a pretty uncommon commodity (at the time), she not only ran the business like her mother but expanded on it,” he said. “That’s a pretty remarkable thing.”
Sports were a must for Slobe’s children, board game nights were frequent and holidays well-celebrated. Slobe loved world travel, journeying regularly into her 80s.
“Even when we got her into assisted living a year and a half ago — unfortunately, dreadful timing with the pandemic hitting — even when she was there, she was always doing every single activity,” Blakemore said. “She made friends easily, and took good advantage of whatever situation she was in.”
She also loved painting and, later in life, became adept at intricate crafting. She would create jewelry, turn painted velvet into pillows and make decorative baskets out of pine needles.
“She was always working with her hands and crafting and painting, and encouraging us to do the same,” Bob Slobe recalled. “It led to our volunteer work at the Crocker at an early age, and the Railroad Museum.”
Slobe was preceded in death by her parents, her husband Robert, her older sister Nancy James, her daughter Sari Kristina, son-in-law Kit Blakemore and nephew Steven James.
She is survived by her children Bob, Gary and Wendy; daughter-in-law Kim Mueller; grandchildren Katy Blakemore Evans and Patrick Blakemore; great-grandchildren Wyatt and Nala Blakemore and Kit and Ryan Evans; and her sister-in-law, Mary Lynly.
Services for Slobe are pending. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Slobe’s memory to the California State Railroad Museum Foundation or the Woodlake pool.
This story was originally published June 2, 2021 at 10:08 AM.
