Life in the Later Lane
A face of medical care in the Mission, Kattia Balestier has been on the front lines for nearly 40 years
Contact her at naomimarcus@sfseniorbeat.com The patient stormed out of the doctor’s office and headed straight for the...
Early computer nerd – now a regular at future-focused public space with bar – slowly realized he “was in the middle of something big”
Contact her at myrakrieger@sfseniorbeat.com When Theo Armour was a young boy, he played a lot, but not with...
Out of the classroom and onto the airplane. Peter Mundy takes his middle-school students around the world.
Peter Mundy wants nothing more than to educate, motivate, and mentor his young students -- and to...
A life of resilience: Escaping Soviet antisemitism, Tatyana Yasnovsky built a life in San Francisco as she practiced psychiatry
For Tatyana Yasnovsky, a retired psychiatrist and émigré from the former Soviet Union, her arrival in America...
Things of heaven and earth – but mostly earth – have captivated neuropsychologist who once pondered the priesthood
When he retired in 2009, Charles Vella began volunteering at the California Academy of Sciences. He became...
With more than 28,000 movies and TV shows on hand, Colin Hutton’s Video Wave store has survived the onslaught of Netflix and Amazon Prime
It was a rainy winter afternoon, and it wasn’t until Video Wave, the last standalone movie rental...
Sixty years later, a writer returns to her childhood home in Mexico and savors the sights, smells and flavors of a changed San Miguel de Allende
Have you ever wondered about retiring to Mexico? Not me, no expat life for me. But I...
‘Wild writing’ softens clinical healthcare leader’s shift to solo career and enriches retirement
Kathryn Santana Goldman showed an affinity for science as early as grammar school when she captured and...
Host of group that supports women forge new life after retirement fitting out her Dodge van to recapture the joys of childhood camping
It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning and Janice Wallace is on Zoom hosting the Bay Area...
Retirement sends Vonn Scott Bair full speed into long days as actor, playwright and game developer
"Do what you want, and you will never work a day in your life." That old adage,...
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San Franciscans and San Francisco share the spotlight in venerable film festival
Two of the many films slated for San Francisco’s 12th Annual Legacy Film Festival on Aging next month are set in the city and produced by local residents. “Waiter for Life” is a short documentary about five waiters over the age of 60 who have worked for between 20 to 30 years at Scoma’s, a ...
The play’s the thing as Michael Sullivan and the San Francisco Mime Troupe bring new meaning to “A Christmas Carol”
Michael Gene Sullivan’s version of Charles Dickens’ traditional “A Christmas Carol” is not about Scrooge, the miser who hates the holiday. Sullivan’s “A Red Carol” is “about everyone else,” a world unrepentant for its cruelties, said the 64-year-old resident director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, appearing at San Francisco’s Z Space Theater through December ...
From weddings, funerals and proms to Dead concerts, Mandela and Pope visits, Hoogasians have been flowering SF since 1928
In San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, before the internet, match.com, and social media, flower stands downtown were one place a boy could meet a girl. Harold Hoogasian met his wife, Nikki, in 1974 at his dad’s Post Street flower stand, where he helped out. She’d accompanied her dad, a funeral director, who’d come ...
Seniors take on new roles with ‘Drama with Friends,’ a Zoom project that had its first live performance
Herbert and Gloria are flirting. Like spooning teens, the elderly pair are joking about their relationship and contemplating new places to have sex. Riding a horse, suggests Herbert, garnering a slightly lascivious grin in return. I loved my (late) husband, says Gloria, hinting that the usually creative man was a rather unimaginative bedmate. Herbert preens ...
Podcast hosts leaned into aging, a topic they call ‘cutting edge’ and ‘sexy’
They met harvesting bananas on a kibbutz in Israel, part of a summer tour introducing young Jews to the then-new country. These days they’re working together as the co-hosts of “Not Born Yesterday,” a half-hour podcast focusing on the challenges and joys of aging. Miriam Goodman and Lynn Winter Gross went on to become college ...
Her name honors a famed New Zealand author. With her first novel published, Sally Abbott is also leading the life of a writer.
Sally Abbott believes her role as a novelist was written before she was born. It started with her middle name: Abbott’s mother was so enamored of the renowned short-story writer Katherine Mansfield that she gave her second daughter the middle name “Mansfield.” To top it off, both Katherine and Sally were born in the same ...
