Practicality atop an adventurous spirit has Potrero Hill resident contemplating eventual move even as she continues to build community

April 30, 2025 0 Comments

Contact her at robinevans@sfseniorbeat.com. Even as she speaks, calmly, about uprooting herself from the neighborhood she’s lived in for 39 years, Audrey Cole is still organizing lunch potlucks, clothing swaps, and cocktail parties to bring people together. An invite to a recent cocktail party at her Potrero Hill home encouraged people to bring neighbors. There would ...

A face of medical care in the Mission, Kattia Balestier has been on the front lines for nearly 40 years

April 23, 2025 Life in the Later Lane 2 Comments

Contact her at naomimarcus@sfseniorbeat.com The patient stormed out of the doctor’s office and headed straight for the reception desk, banging on the plexiglass partition that separates patients from receptionists in this busy Mission District primary care practice. Kattia Balestier, the lead front desk worker, looked up calmly at the 60ish, red-faced, glowering man. “You were ...

Early computer nerd – now a regular at future-focused public space with bar – slowly realized he “was in the middle of something big”

April 18, 2025 Life in the Later Lane 1 Comment

Contact her at myrakrieger@sfseniorbeat.com   When Theo Armour was a young boy, he played a lot, but not with the popular toys of the day like Mr. Potato Head, Silly Putty, or Hula Hoop. Even at six or seven, he said, he was doing “technical stuff.” “I was already playing with my calculators, using little baby computers,” ...

Out of the classroom and onto the airplane. Peter Mundy takes his middle-school students around the world.

March 23, 2025 Life in the Later Lane 0 Comments

Peter Mundy wants nothing more than to educate, motivate, and mentor his young students — and to travel with them around the world. The 63-year-old Castro resident teaches seventh- and eighth-grade history at Cathedral School for Boys, where he’s worked for 27 years. He has taken his students on trips to Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, and ...

A life of resilience: Escaping Soviet antisemitism, Tatyana Yasnovsky built a life in San Francisco as she practiced psychiatry  

March 19, 2025 Life in the Later Lane 0 Comments

For Tatyana Yasnovsky, a retired psychiatrist and émigré from the former Soviet Union, her arrival in America in the mid-‘70s was fraught and unforgettable. “I had two little kids on my hands and we were very anxious about the prospect of living in America,” she said. Prompted to leave Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, to escape ...

Things of heaven and earth – but mostly earth – have captivated neuropsychologist who once pondered the priesthood

March 14, 2025 Life in the Later Lane 0 Comments

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 ...

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