It’s not quite six o’clock on a June morning in 2021, and the fire alarm was going off yet again in the building Paul Hickman had called home since 1996. “Stay or go?” he asked himself, remembering the many times he wandered downstairs, responding dutifully to the frequent false alarms. Then came a pounding on ...
When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco in 1989, Mack Dudley, a Walgreen’s pharmacy tech, was at his post: the pharmacy counter at the Ocean and Mission store. “I wasn’t sure what it was, but my coworker panicked, and took cover in this empty cabinet we had. The only part of him that fit ...
A SENIOR BEAT COLUMN It got hot in Carmel, and I was wearing my San Francisco fog clothes: jeans, turtleneck, sweatshirt. I’d left the misty, chilly city in early morning darkness and driven 125 miles south to visit my invalid mom, 95, at my childhood home in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Oddly, despite the coastal closeness, it was ...
When he was 41, Chad Folkers realized he needed to get sober, go back to school and find a new career. After eight years of full-time work as a waiter and full-time classes, he graduated from nursing school with honors. But within a short time, the future he imagined was derailed – twice. Just after ...
When Angelina De Anda makes chicken soup, her first step is to dice ginger and garlic into coins, to flavor the water. When her mom made chicken soup, the first steps were to “kill and pluck the chicken!” she recounts with a rueful grin. “Though we lived in the border city of Cuidad Juarez, we ...
Gonzalo Guoron arrived every morning at 5:45 a.m., threw open the doors at 6 a.m., and ushered 50 to 90 tired souls up all night in the cold into the warmth of the Episcopal Church of Saint John the Evangelist. Until the pandemic closed those doors, Guoron was a hospitality monitor for the Mission District ...
