When he retired in 2009, Charles Vella began volunteering at the California Academy of Sciences. He became known as the “amateur paleontologist.” His first volunteer job was sorting freshwater snails in the basement, which he did for a year. Then with a week’s training, Vella became a docent for the Evolution Group on the main ...
Kathryn Santana Goldman showed an affinity for science as early as grammar school when she captured and chronicled a variety of insects found in her backyard. “My parents had one of those 30-volume encyclopedia sets that I used to look up the insects and document my findings in a small notebook,” she said.“I especially liked ...
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 ...
It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning and Janice Wallace is on Zoom hosting the Bay Area chapter of Women’s Connection, a national network that supports those looking for new life opportunities past retirement. Wallace joined in part to make new friends. Her husband wasn’t all that social, she said. His main interest was collecting ...
Bruce Neuburger was never an armchair radical. Organizing against the Vietnam War while in the Coast Guard earned him an early, though honorable, discharge from the service. He helped organize GIs at Fort Ord and spent nearly a decade as a lettuce worker in California’s fields, supporting efforts to improve the miserable working conditions endured ...
If you think dollhouses are just for children, you haven’t met the artisans and collectors, like Margaret Lew, who play in the Lilliputian world of miniature furnishings and accoutrements. Lew’s passion for miniatures surfaced in childhood – she “always liked the little things for my dollhouse” – and reignited in 2003, when at 60, she ...
